THE PLAGiARiST

He was not an artist. He despised art with a passion. He was a craftsman. Thievery he deemed to be more honest than originality, not to mention safer. If you're original, getting caught is dangerous. You don't want to go round telling those guys in white coats you're a one-off, a never to be repeated once in a lifetime offer.

He went out of his way to signpost the influences, to highlight his borrowings, to wrench the back of our necks down on the oral sex of his literary liftings. But still no one saw them. They continued to hail him. They canonised him as The Greatest Literary Genius Of The Early 21st Century, but he spurned their plaudits. He called the critics asinine, idiotic, cock-eyed, moronic, senseless, spineless shits. They applauded all the more. They marvelled at the breadth of his lexical expression which he'd lifted directly from Roget's Thesaurus only that morning. The fools, he thought as he gazed out across the wide open green space of Hampstead Heath where a recently unburdened Martin Amis was gamboling naked like a lamb to the slaughter. Gangs of rubber-clad book club members'll recycle his guts for garters, he thought publicly on his blog that day - accidentally sparking off a spate of literary witch hunts adjacent to Frognal & Finchley station.

He spewed out regurgitated Chomsky, Klein and G.K.Galbraith and passed it off as his own. He produced a biography of Louis Althusser - a leading Marxian intellectual who posthumously confessed to his never having read Marx in his life. He entirely plagiarised it from the material which he had stolen from Mme Althusser's pc, when he interviewed her about her husband's death.

He is a magpie of language. He claims to have re-introduced the following lexically modified items into mass circulation, thanks to a long-standing arrangement with the EU's English Excess Expressions Lake technocrats, whereby he enjoys exclusive access to the huge fund of idiomatic overproduction: jobsworth; nightmare; trolleyology; Paddy Goes To Holyhead; virtual Friday; Blunkett Gate; Sudoku widows; Do-it-all mums; astroturfing; vertical drinking; celbutard; happy slapping; al-desko; numptorium; drinktea; Saga louts; phone chicken; muffin tops and It's a no brainer.

Even the three suspension points in the title of his Once Upon a Time in America... had been directly lifted from the box of a video he hadn't even bothered to watch. He had plundered a particulary urgent stream of consciousness from Robert De Niro's preparatory notes and used it for the entire novel. Meeting the actor at an award ceremony once, he'd felt very nervous in his presence - quite aside from the theft - De Niro was the only man he'd ever had conscious sexual desires for.

The actor remembered him as that nervous sweaty English gay in an aside later that day. A misplaced vowel of Freudian proportions that produced the writer's only romantic novel to date, Talking Italian With Robert De Niro. The debate surrounding its inspiration - the track of the same name - still rages. The writer swears he had the whole thing ghost written by Siobahn from Bananarama.


She denies having done so, and has sworn an affadavit that it was indeed written and devised entirely by the author as part of an elaborate post-modern marketing drive.