Fame? Well, Sort Of ...

I recently discovered that I have been "graced" (so to speak) by an online paper mill that's offering for sale a college paper on one of my poems. In its website, MightyStudents.com calls itself an "academic essay library" with student papers that "can be used for research, reference, and revision aid only." They continue, "Note, that our essay data base is submitted to the plagiarism detection software." Their "party line" — if we were f2f face-to-face I would do air quotes here — their "party line" is that their papers cannot be submitted as original work by students who buy them, yet on their "testimonials" page, one of their satisfied clients says, "I am really impressed with the quality of the essays and so was my professor. I revised the essay and changed some things, yet the hard part was already done for me." Hmm. Ironically, the company cites as one of its reasons for rejecting submitted papers "duplicate or plagiarized content." In-freaking-credible. Okay, let's dig a bit more into this. First, here's the poem. Beetle on a String When I was a kid, I walked bugs on a leash. This was in the Philippines, where my parents and I moved when I was a toddler, trading foggy San Francisco for Manila's typhoons. Actually, it was an idyllic place for a child — warm evenings drenched in the sweet scent of sampaguita flowers, but most of all, a huge universe of enthralling insects filling the night with buzzing and clicks, strobe flashes of their glow-in-the-dark wingflicks. It was my father who showed me how to catch a scarab beetle in the cup of your hand, wait for the wings to subside and close, then loop a thread between thorax and carapace, tying it off — not too tight — to allow the insect to fly on a two-foot-long lasso. I remember how I would smile and laugh, maybe five or six years old, as a beetle would circle my head like a whirring kite, iridescent green in the sun, the thread stretched almost to the breaking point. At night, I would tie my beetles to the round knobs on my dresser drawers and be soothed to sleep by a lullaby of buzzing. By morning, the beetles were always dead, weights hung on string. Those long nights must have been horrible. Straining your body to shift an immovable weight, unable to evade the swooping flight of predators, banging again and again hard against the dead wood, brought up short by that unforgiving tether, cutting off your pulsing blood every time, the long tube of your heart quivering. It makes me shiver now to wonder what thoughtless boy holds my string? —  Vince Gotera, first appeared in Flippin': Filipinos on America (1996); reprinted in Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (2001), the textbook Asian American Literature (2001), the textbook Music, Pictures, and Stories: A Poetry Anthology (2002), and the textbook Holt Multicultural Reader (2007). According to the MightyStudents.com specs, that paper on my poem earned an A originally, and so presumably would earn the buyer an A. However, the fragment of opening paragraph which the website lets us see suggests that the paper focuses on the father's imparting to the speaker (as a child) the knowledge of how to keep a beetle as a pet. This is a minor point; the main point has to do with the speaker's sense of guilt, as an adult, about having essentially tortured these beetles. I really doubt this paper would earn an A in a rigorous class environment. (I should issue a caveat here: the author of a work is typically not the best authority on that work, because all sorts of features of the work may be invisible to the author because of repression, which we all do constantly.) So, if you are now looking at this blog page because you are writing a paper on "Beetle on a String" and you googled your way here, do not buy the MightyStudents.com paper. First, it's not illegal but certainly wrong. Second, you won't learn as much, no matter what MightyStudents.com says ("MightyStudents.com is highly appreciated by teachers!" . . . yeah, right). Let me give you a little boost up: "Beetle on a String" is written in a roughed-up pentameter. You figure out if it's iambic or whatever. Or if you think I even care, as a poet, about such things. Look at some of the write-ups on other poems in the blog, especially "Craft and Technique (1.0)." Finally, about fame. I have to admit I'm perversely proud that there is a term-paper-mill essay about my work. It's like the time when a copy of one of my books at the Rod Library here at the University of Northern Iowa turned up missing. Someone had actually taken the effort and risk to steal my book. Well, that's cool in a weird sort of way. I guess such is fame. We take what we can get. Peace out. NOTE: Sources for the images above, top to bottom, are (1) H. Vannoy Davis © California Academy of Sciences, (2) Richard Calmes Photography (Vietnam, 1968-1969), and (3) DK Images. Do browse through Richard Calmes's photographs; his portraits are amazing, both the contemporary dance photos and the Vietnam War images. Viewers' comments in his Vietnam War gallery show that his photography has touched a deep chord in many people's hearts. Note added 31 January 2009: check out a wildly different beetle on a string! Note added 6 May 2011: "Beetle on a String" featured in online video.