Anti-mimesis

I have always been fascinated by the mystery of inspiration.  I find it strange that other writers are often simultaneously working on a project similar to mine, with a very similar theme.  One reason that I do not do much research for precedents in fiction is that I fear that I might be influenced by someone else's writing on a project similar to mine.  Most readers can recognize plagiarism when they see it if they have read the same thing from two different writers.  Different versions of a subject are okay, but not copying and pasting, with a word processor, something someone else has said and publishing it as one's own work. Plagiarism and literary theft are running rampant in the world with the advent of the cyber age where theft of intellectual property has been made much easier.

“Anti-mimesis is a philosophical position that holds the direct opposite of Aristotelian mimesis. Its most notable proponent is Oscar Wilde, who opined in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that, "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life". In the essay, written as a Platonic dialogue, Wilde holds that anti-mimesis "results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression”

Sometimes, life imitating art can be very dangerous when warped ideas are put into print and given credible characters to carry out those ideas.  Timothy McVey's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building was an imitation of an act he'd read about in William Pierce's (Pen name, Andrew McDonald) novel, The Turner Diaries.

With those thoughts in mind, I recently read a story in a Juarez, Mexico newspaper about a female who is riding commuter buses and killing drivers to avenge sexual assaults and murders of women assembly factory commuters.  This was a prominent theme of my novel, The Border Body Dumps.  See the "Sample Text" lifted from the novel further below.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imitating_artsion,”

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“Olga, and later hire, Rocio Davis, an Iraq War widow and Mexican native, have some serious scores to settle with machismo-driven, border men.

SAMPLE TEXT

"You mean I gotta go in drag?"

 "That's a crude and cynical way of putting it Ross. ...We will...make ourselves bait for some of the maquila commuter bus drivers they call ruteros, and other targets."

 "A man could get seriously killed that way."

ISBN 978-0-9785687-2-6

©2007

The female bus-driver assassin in Juarez was motivated by the same events that motivated the female assassin characters in my novel, The Border Body Dumps. You can read the story in its entirety at this web address:

http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/ci_24005251/juarez-bus-drivers-idle-after-revenge-killings