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" On the occasion of the actor striking again, we republish Tom Chiarella&amp;#039;s response to LaBeouf&amp;#039;s plagiarism of his story earlier this year. I can&amp;#039;t make myself care too much about Shia LaBeouf plagiarizing my words in his letter to Alec Baldwin over some spat over some play. He loaded a few paragraphs of what I wrote in a 2009 issue of Esquire into his cannons, attached them to the phrase &amp;quot;What I know of men,&amp;quot; and then fired straight into the broadside of the HMS Baldwin. And with that, it seems, the battle between the two of them quelled. What can I say? Am I outraged? Of course not. It actually makes me happy that my words were some succor to the kid, that he found them wise enough (or high enough on the Google search, anyway) to foist them off as his own. Any writer wants to be read, remembered, considered. A late-night e-mail, double-spaced, vaguely bullet-pointed \u2014 this too is a kind of literary memory, I guess, especially when you leak it on Twitter to evince a magnanimous self. And in a clip-and-paste universe, words are stolen like Splenda packets from a deli full of old ladies. One of my students once turned in to me an article that I had written, without a single word changed, nor \u2014 of course \u2014 attribution. In the next class, I crossed out the student&amp;#039;s name, wrote &amp;quot;By me!&amp;quot; at the top, and handed it back. As I glanced at the kid like she was crazy, she cringed and said, &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t know.&amp;quot; I think she meant it to explain everything, the whole world of what she had yet to learn. I had to get her laughing about it. And when I did, I had to give her an F. I can&amp;#039;t really do that to Shia LaBeouf. It&amp;#039;s not a fail. What he said was different; his assertion (the only one that was really his) was about knowledge, not ignorance. What he said was, &amp;quot;What I know of men.&amp;quot; In some way, this at least implies that he learned all that followed somewhere. From me! From Google! From, as he ambiguously implies, his drug-dealer father! From a magazine article he read on a plane hanging over some ocean almost four years ago! In a lot of ways, that&amp;#039;s just fine by me \u2014 to have informed the (apparently emergent) manhood of a young guy, caught in a spat with an old guy who intimidates even me. I&amp;#039;m glad the words worked. As a man, I like that feeling. But I also like royalty checks directed to my little house in Indiana, as I&amp;#039;m sure LaBeouf likes getting royalty checks every time he farts. Any man could see that. But over time a man learns: Hope has its limits. PLUS: 9 Esquire Profiles of Truly Great Men &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a19814/tom-chiarella-shia-labeouf-plagiarism-15127245/>