The student I caught cheating, having copied answers from an old solution sheet, asked to speak with me after class. He came to my office to explain himself, saying he’d found the solutions by “looking around on Google.” “I didn’t know they were yours.”

Interesting logic. It would be ok to copy somebody else’s solutions, just not mine?

He went on, “I didn’t mean to copy. I was just looking for inspiration.”

More interesting logic. If he didn’t mean to copy, why did he copy? (Word-for-word, in fact, apart from a few errors of sloppy transcription.)

The most interesting bit of logic was the apology he repeated over and over again (it was hard to get this young man out of my office),

“I’m sorry.”

This is the subtle one. To say “I’m sorry” wasn’t completely beside the point, I suppose, since his cheating annoyed me, but then again, it didn’t feel right. It’s not me who was the main victim of his breaking the rules. Society is a machine that depends upon people staying more or less in line. As we struggle to keep it running smoothly, we must remember that it’s human nature to make things personal, to seek absolution from the professor.

[24 September 2015]

Forty-three years ago, I played a trick on my high school English teacher that I have felt bad about ever since. One week, I wrote an excellent piece on some subject or another, and Mr. Terry praised my talent. The next week we had a free assignment to write on anything. Knowing he admired me, I did something reprehensible: I wrote an obscure little piece of fiction that actually had no real meaning. I called it “Icebergs”, an allusion to suppressed memories or some such. But it was pretty much content-free. I deliberately packed it with words that were clearly allusions to something deeper—but the thing is, there was nothing deeper. Mr. Terry was fooled, or at least uncertain, and gave me an A or maybe even an A+. I am ashamed of this story.

Forty-three years later, walking down Broadway after hastening through a Yoko Ono retrospective at MoMA, I found myself thinking about “Icebergs”, and rather incredibly, it occurred to me for the very first time that my act of creating art without meaning was no more than what artists and writers do all the time. Sometimes an obscure work has a meaning, but you can be sure not always—and what’s more, it’s not certain this is a bad thing. (See any of my index cards on Bob Dylan.) How did it take me all these years to realize that my indiscretion was standard procedure?

[7 September 2015]