I happened to notice this story about how Men at Work had been successfully sued for plagiarism by Larrikin Music. They claimed the band had ‘stolen’ the flute riff from the 1981 hit ‘Down Under’ from ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’, written by Marion Sinclair in 1934.

This seemed an odd decision – not because I don’t think there was a borrowing but because it’s so obvious that ‘Down Under’ alludes to (or perhaps quotes from) the song. It’s a bit like saying T.S. Eliot plagiarised Hamlet when he inserted Ophelia’s ‘good night, sweet ladies’ into The Waste Land (or indeed that Lou Reed plagiarised Eliot).

The riff is separated from the song as a discrete element – it’s not being used as a substitute for composing something new. It seems to me that this is a deliberate and apt hommage to a folksy children’s song about Australia in a satirical pop song about the experience of Australian backpackers which invokes lots of Aussie stereotypes.

I was intrigued by discussions amongst colleagues about the (possible) unfairness of the fact that the BFWG offers funding only to female graduate students so I blogged about the issue here. I would always describe myself as a feminist. Certain issues concerning women's rights are so stark that it's hard to find any room for argument or debate. By comparison, any concerns feminists might feel about UK issues are likely to seem less pressing. The ’double shift' is one possible area which still leaves room for improvement and there are other contexts in which women may be discriminated against, perhaps at an unconscious level. Discourse, particularly in the blogosphere, is often irritatingly sexist - hardly a life and death issue but it can become wearing.

But there are some areas where both women and men may, in different ways, feel disadvantaged. The assumption that women are more suited to childcare, for example, may work against the interests of both sexes. On Harry’s Place someone suggests that women may prefer to remain unpromoted, focusing on teaching rather than bureaucracy. One might respond by arguing that society encourages women not to push themselves, not to aspire to the kind of job which is both more lucrative and more demanding. But this argument can be turned round. Both my father and my father- in-law felt they had to give up their preferred poorly paid (but very interesting) career ambitions in order to go into business and support their families.

Going back to academia, even if it can be demonstrated that there are systemic biases or barriers facing women, targeting money at postgraduates just because they happen to be female might not be the most nuanced solution. It might be better to ‘drill down’ to work out exactly why and when women fall behind and address the proximate cause – perhaps childcare.

UPDATE

Here's a little example of discrimination against men. If female parents seem to get a raw deal in the work place sometimes - male parents appear to be far more blatantly discriminated against when it come to parenting/childcare. Scroll down to the sleeping arrangements bit.

I’ve always been fond of word games and literary quizzes. When I was little I used to love watching Call my Bluff (with Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell) and a bit later, as a teenaged bookworm in the 80s, was keen on a programme (The Book Game?) in which celebrities such as Germaine Greer had to identify books after hearing short extracts. One of my favourite games is Ex Libris where you have to fake a book’s first or last sentence – and persuade others that your version is the true solution. (This game seems to be unavailable but it’s easy to prepare your own homemade set based on the information given in the above link – could be a good distraction from the snow.) Over the years I’ve devised quite a few literary quizzes for students too – and always rather wish I could be playing on a team rather than reading out the questions. So I enjoyed tackling Norman Geras’ recent Boxing Day Literary Quiz – and, being unashamedly competitive, I also enjoyed reading the winning results.

I saw Tim Burton’s first Batman film again last night and was struck by the similarities between the closing scenes and the climax of Vertigo. As I’ve been doing some work on repetition (both internal and intertextual) in Vertigo, I wanted to think about why Tim Burton chose to include haunting echoes of Hitchcock in an apparently very different film.

Batman’s final showdown with the Joker takes place on a bell tower. Both the setting – and more crucially the camera angles used – recall two key moments in Vertigo. In the first the heroine only seems to fall to her death, in the second both fall and death are genuine. Others have noted these similarities.

But what is their effect? I only started thinking about Vertigo at the very end of Batman but reflecting back over the whole film I thought other possible echoes could be identified. In an earlier sequence Batman tries to save Jack Napier from falling into a tub of acid but to his horror sees his enemy fall to his apparent death. (Napier is hideously deformed and reinvents himself as the Joker.) Vertigo also features an earlier prolepsis of the bell tower scenes when Scottie fails to save his policeman colleague from falling off a roof. The detectives, like Batman, are chasing a criminal at the time.

In Vertigo Scottie is intent on transforming his girlfriend Judy into the double of his ‘dead’ love, Madeleine. (In fact Judy is Madeleine so the transformation works uncannily well!) Something similar happens in Batman but in this film it is the Joker who is determined to change the appearance of his girlfriends. He disfigures one girl with acid, forcing her to wear a mask, and tries to do the same to Vicki Vale.

This link with Scottie is again hinted at when the Joker finally falls to his death. His form as it lies on the ground seems to echo Scottie’s own nightmares of falling – the image which is reproduced on the film’s iconic poster.

So the virtuous Batman and the evil Joker are linked by their shared affinities with Hitchcock’s equivocal hero, Scottie. If this is the intention (or at least the effect) of the Vertigo strand in Batman it would link the caped crusader with other ‘good’ characters – Prospero, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Doctor Who and Hamlet for example – who seem to have a curious bond with their antagonists.

UPDATE
My work on Vertigo is partly concerned with the uncanny sense of déjà vu the viewer experiences if s/he recognizes the way Hitchcock is recycling earlier texts. Batman represented a further stage in this repetitive, allusive cycle and last night, by an uncanny coincidence, I found myself watching yet another quotation of Vertigo - Death Becomes Her. Here one of the heroines is another blonde Madeleine who falls to her ‘death’, returns to life, and is transformed with cosmetics by her husband. The allusions to Vertigo in both these films are briefly noted in the Wikipedia article on Vertigo . But the fact that I watched both films on consecutive nights is just a spooky coincidence!

Allusion has always been the main focus of my research. When you try to establish that one text is alluding to (or just unconsciously echoing) another, it is usual to try to pinpoint local verbal echoes or maybe the repetition of some plot element. But it can also be interesting to think about such literary links in terms of the affinities between the ‘pictures’ they create in your mind as you read. For example at the ‘Cultures of Translation’ conference I gave a presentation suggesting that a sixteenth-century poem by Thomas Underdowne about Theseus and Ariadne might, in some small way, have influenced A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The links between the two were comparatively slight and for me the strongest link between them was visual – the situations and relationships between characters are really quite different but if you were to illustrate certain scenes from both texts you’d probably produce two very similar designs.

Another example of ‘visual’ impact linking two texts which might seem to have little in common relates to the sources of Hamlet. In Saxo’s version of the Hamlet story, Hamlet returns from apparent death, is reunited with his mother in a hall where a tapestry hangs, kills the followers of his wicked uncle, and torches the building. Visually this is very similar to what happens at the end of the Odyssey, and the process of visualising the two scenes serves to occlude differences (Penelope is Odysseus’ wife not his mother, the suitors are his main enemies not mere followers of a single enemy, the wicked uncle, and the tapestries have a totally different significance) and highlight all the affinities between them.

Recently I’ve been returning to the Orpheus story, particularly to instances of the myth’s reception which imply that Orpheus subconsciously wanted Eurydice to die, and thus looked back at her on purpose. Again, considering the way we visualise the fatal glance may help explain why such an apparently perverse reversal of the original legend has been a significant factor in the story’s afterlife. If we look at this painting of the story we may wonder ‘did she fall or was she pushed’ whereas in this depiction Orpheus seems to be strangling rather than clinging on to his wife.

Thus thinking about the importance of the visual can perhaps help explain the cognitive mechanisms behind the way a later author processes and responds to an earlier text – and also perhaps illuminate some of the strange ways in which stories get distorted or reversed when they are retold.