Lethem Assignment

I chose the passage on page 220 and 221 about how you can’t steal a gift. Naturally the first place I checked was the key, which led me to the musician, Dizzy Gillespie. A Google search of the name and the quote gave me the book “You can’t steal a gift” by Gene Lees, documenting the similarities between musicians and their craft, including race. The book takes a “colorblind” approach, documenting both the positives and negatives of racism in the industry, but at its core, the author writes to celebrate the characters of four musicians in particular, including Dizzy Gillespie.

The passage and its source are drastically different: one is a quote from a musician, the other delineates the hard economics of a “gift economy.” At first, I found this exceedingly odd, how Lethem transforms a heartwarming mentality into concrete cause and effect market economics. Moreover, the original topic, music, has been changed to the aforementioned market economics, the two of which could be any more unlike. However, what I soon realized was that the target audiences for both were drastically different, and therefore the argument had to be framed drastically differently. Though Gillespie says his quote to reporters on the subject of music, an innately free art, Lethem has to argue this point to businessmen, the people who withhold their “gifts” from the market. Once this frame of reference is taken into account, the transformation is much more understandable. Personally, I couldn’t recognize this passage as plagiarism by any stretch of the imagination. In a university setting, the passage wouldn’t be flagged as being plagiarized at the very least. What I understood from this exercise is that quotes and sources need to be properly synthesized into your own writing. Lethem does this so skillfully that citing a source in the midst of his writing would feel jarring. Ultimately, Lethem’s writing supports his own point in saying that eventually, writing tends to mesh together until you can’t tell if it’s one author’s ar another’s.