An excerpt from Schneiderman’s “On Groucho, Plagiarism, and the Camps”:

I had Groucho very much in mind when writing [SIC], my new and plagiarized novel. The work takes it’s title from the Latin abbreviation for “as written,” includes public domain works, like “Caedmon’s Hymn,” Sherlock Holmes, and the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, and features Wikipedia pages, intellectual property law, genetic codes, and other untoward appropriations. The text also pivots on Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” taking its publication history through a replicated series of Google auto-translations.

Andi Olsen’s photos of me—a pathogen in Paris, France—in a Lycra suit, illustrate the text, which contains an introduction from Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker, and sampling-based tracks, already created for other projects, from Illegal Art label acts Yea Big, Oh Astro, Steinski, and Girl Talk.

The fine-art edition ($24,998.98) comes with a biological pathogen, which the reader may choose to deploy over the text. In this way, [SIC] will make the reader sick—sick about copyright. The book is timed to the release of 25 free, full-text e-books—including The Red-Headed League and Young Goodman Brown, now bearing my “signature.”

Read the rest of the essay HERE.