Jonathan Lethem was interviewed by Terry Gross Monday on Fresh Air. He has a new book You Don't Love Me Yet in which he recasts plagiarism as "value-neutral." Issues of appropriation and attribution are not new in the arts, but have generally been given a context that allows for societal and legal assessment: students copy other works with the understanding that students are not assessed with the same expectations; "real" artists use appropriation as a means of commenting or elaborating on previous works. In today's mashup and mixdown culture, some are postulating that plagiarism of music and images is kind of over. But writers of scholarly or popular works are still held accountable for using their own original words.
Lathem is interested in creating a more communal approach to writing. His Promiscuous Materials Project puts his words out for others to adapt and adopt as they will. In his overview of this project, he states: "My thinking along these lines has been strongly influenced by Open Source theory and the Free Culture movement, and by Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift."
He points to the Wikipedia entry on Open Source Culture, which in turn points to a "mediography" on Open Source Culture. This list includes content related to Dangermouses' Grey Album, a the internationally-famous mashup of the Beatle's White Album and Jay-Z's The Black Album. The battle over the copyright issues related to this groundbreaking musical re-use collage was intense, and involved many heavyweights bound to put a stop to the whole thing. But in the end, all efforts faded under the sheer demand for the re-mixed content. For those who want to mashup, this battle was a triumph. For those who want to guard, is any rock and roll song really original anyway? For everyone else: if you make anything digital today, be prepared to share...
Monday, March 12, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Don't Be an A******
NPR has been full of stories about Robert Sutton's new book The No A****** Rule. The website Fifty Lesson has a video of him talking about the rule. He says something that seems like a worthy follow-up to avoiding a lighthouse:
"If you start reading management books the message tends to be [...] the more you care the better things are going to be. My argument is actually is very often in life, learning not to care and learning to be indifferent is incredibly important and it's something we don't teach people enough. So if you are in a situation where there is nothing that you can do about changing it, you might as well just ignore it and go on and do what's best for you, maybe hide from your boss a little bit. But indifference and not caring is something I think that we need to teach people to get better at. And it's harder to do that in life, but it's one of my goals as an adult is to start getting better and better at figuring out what doesn't matter to me and ignoring it."
Lighthouse Means Stay Away
Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology can usually be counted on for a quasi-oracular, semi-poetic, tie-dyed trip through the metaphor. This week, my horoscope asks me to consider what in my life is acting like a lighthouse. And I began to wonder what a lighthouse acts like.
Citing the poem Treasure Island by Keith Althaus, Rob suggests that lighthouses are not just beacons of safety, but beacons of danger.
So, lighthouses aren't really telling you to "come here," they are telling you to stay away from the rocks, get back from the sand bar, stay off the shoals. You don't go to lighthouses. But if you're lost in the fog, don't you want to?
Blogger Dear Elena has something to say about lighthouses, quoting Stephen Covey's story of a ship on unalterable course warning off a smaller boat, only to learn that it is a lighthouse that must be avoided. His point is to avoid those things that can't be changed. As I read through his other posts, I realize that his blog begins immediately following the death of his six year old daughter. It feels unbearably personal. What is this phenomenon where people cast their words out into the world, so small in the vast Internet, like pennies too small to ripple in the ocean? And yet, here I am reading his words, and wondering about his loss and his life, which is thrown into relief by the passing beams of his posts.
Citing the poem Treasure Island by Keith Althaus, Rob suggests that lighthouses are not just beacons of safety, but beacons of danger.
So, lighthouses aren't really telling you to "come here," they are telling you to stay away from the rocks, get back from the sand bar, stay off the shoals. You don't go to lighthouses. But if you're lost in the fog, don't you want to?
Blogger Dear Elena has something to say about lighthouses, quoting Stephen Covey's story of a ship on unalterable course warning off a smaller boat, only to learn that it is a lighthouse that must be avoided. His point is to avoid those things that can't be changed. As I read through his other posts, I realize that his blog begins immediately following the death of his six year old daughter. It feels unbearably personal. What is this phenomenon where people cast their words out into the world, so small in the vast Internet, like pennies too small to ripple in the ocean? And yet, here I am reading his words, and wondering about his loss and his life, which is thrown into relief by the passing beams of his posts.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Rome Wasn't Built in A Day
The second season of HBO's Rome has me reading Edith Hamilton's The Roman Way and looking around the Internet to see what people are saying about the veracity and value of the series. There seems to be a consensus on the HBO Rome forum that this season is losing its way, migrating from the historical into the fantastical.
Last season, I was struck by how in spite of how much Latin I had translated about Pompey and Caeser and the Civil War, I had somehow missed the basics of the story. I had struggled with Lucan's Pharsalia, which was written in a florid and lurid mix of ten-year-old boy-style-gore and obscure and digressive poetical allusion. Small events would be engulfed in entire paragraph-long sentences of metaphor: As in the Cyntherian rites, when the hills would ripple with the golden fleece of lambs and young maidens would cry and the wolves would howl on the occasion of seeing the glorious promise of spring, and all of the winds and the heavens would conspire to bring the heavy javelins of Jupiter into the midst of clamour and tumolt, so did the young warriors crest the flank of battle, all too soon their blood boiling on the hard plains of Pharsalia.
Rome depicts the actual events in a straightforward way, with at least as much fidelity as Lucan, if I understand his standing correctly. He is considered a better poet than a historian, and if that is true, his history must be lousy!
Oh, the humiliation I endured in that terrible class from that tiny, antediluvian, misogynistic, seersuckered professor alternatively sneering at the girls, encouraging the boys, and fondly enunciating every syllable of the gore.
Every generation finds its way to the Romans. I recently found out that two of my acquaintances, most unlikely to have an interest in Classics, have become hooked on Rome. Good story, good acting, mediocre history, or perhaps just the usual abuse of history for the sake of art, and proof that sex and drugs and rock and roll are as eternal as Rome itself.
Blog posts on Rome:
Hybernaut Talks about Historical Inaccuracies
Glaukopidos Runs Down the Latest Episode
Rome on HBO
Last season, I was struck by how in spite of how much Latin I had translated about Pompey and Caeser and the Civil War, I had somehow missed the basics of the story. I had struggled with Lucan's Pharsalia, which was written in a florid and lurid mix of ten-year-old boy-style-gore and obscure and digressive poetical allusion. Small events would be engulfed in entire paragraph-long sentences of metaphor: As in the Cyntherian rites, when the hills would ripple with the golden fleece of lambs and young maidens would cry and the wolves would howl on the occasion of seeing the glorious promise of spring, and all of the winds and the heavens would conspire to bring the heavy javelins of Jupiter into the midst of clamour and tumolt, so did the young warriors crest the flank of battle, all too soon their blood boiling on the hard plains of Pharsalia.
Rome depicts the actual events in a straightforward way, with at least as much fidelity as Lucan, if I understand his standing correctly. He is considered a better poet than a historian, and if that is true, his history must be lousy!
Oh, the humiliation I endured in that terrible class from that tiny, antediluvian, misogynistic, seersuckered professor alternatively sneering at the girls, encouraging the boys, and fondly enunciating every syllable of the gore.
Every generation finds its way to the Romans. I recently found out that two of my acquaintances, most unlikely to have an interest in Classics, have become hooked on Rome. Good story, good acting, mediocre history, or perhaps just the usual abuse of history for the sake of art, and proof that sex and drugs and rock and roll are as eternal as Rome itself.
Blog posts on Rome:
Hybernaut Talks about Historical Inaccuracies
Glaukopidos Runs Down the Latest Episode
Rome on HBO
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