By now, everybody has heard about Helene Hegemann, the seventeen-year-old German who has finally made people wonder whether “mixing” in literature is artistically viable.

And if you have not, it’s only because literature has become such a boring topic that not even a major literary scandal – or at least what seems like a scandal to us English-speakers – registers.

What annoys us least about this is that somebody has stolen passages from another book. What annoys us most about it is that a seventeen-year-old is getting published and winning prizes when we can’t even get our fabulous story about alienation published in a literary journal nobody reads.

I, for one, like the idea of mixing. I’d mention at the end, in an appendix, who I mixed, but that’s me.

We allow music to be mixed without accusations because we recognize what’s being mixed (i.e. the theft is too blatant to be suspicious) or because we hold, perhaps, a higher estimation of ownership on a pattern of words than a pattern of notes.

Anyway, I hope this girl keeps mixing. And pissing off traditionalists.