TWO IMPORTANT LANGUAGE NOTES

1) The proper English term for the Jewish celebrations in early adolescence is hereby termed "b'mitzvah" (both singular and plural). This allows easy sentences like, "when are your kids' b'mitzvahs?" or "we've been going to a lot of b'mitvahs lately", to say nothing of gender-noncomforming kids.

2) The word ducking is now an intensifier, as in "I can't ducking believe Pelosi actually had the guts to start impeachment hearings", and "I hope that the GOP is willing to do its ducking job and convict". Easier on kids & Apple ducking lets you type it.

Signed,

The English Language Academy

Three Exciting Pieces of Humument News

I just found out three exciting pieces of Humument news!

— News about what now?

A Humument.  A Humument is a book by artist Tom Phillips  Kinda.  Maybe it's three books.  Or not a book.  It's a something.

...Let me start over.

Once upon a time, there was a novel by one W. H. Mallock (1849-1923) called A Human Document (1892).  It came out, was presumably read by someone at some point, and then was completely forgotten, until an artist named Tom Phillips (b. 1937) found it at an old store when he was looking for a book to alter, to treat, to change, as part of an artistic project.  He bought it and began to alter its pages.  He crossed out, painted over and drew on each page — leaving, however, some words to make up a new (hidden, revealed) story running through the art.  The first edition — which was unnumbered, but which given subsequent events should perhaps be considered edition zero —came out, from a small press, in 1970.  A edition came out from a larger publisher, Thames & Hudson, in 1980.  (It is considered, I believe, the "first" edition, although so far as I know it isn't formally numbered.)

But.  Phillips continued to work on it.

He'd altered the entire book into a single, amazing artwork. But he kept altering pages — replacing old ones with new versions.  And then he'd publish a new edition with the new pages substituting for the old versions.  (Thus each edition is slightly different.)  The second edition (so-called, actually third) came out in 1986; the third in 1998; the fourth in 2004.  I own the fourth, having read it (Browsed it?  Looked at it?  What does one do with A Humument, anyway?) from the library.  Apparently Mr. Phillips's ambition is to replace every page from his original 1970 edition.  With a new version.

I understand that.  The various pages from the original edition is simply not as rich, not as wonderful, as the pages from the later editions.  Here, see for yourself: here is the third page from the original (1970) edition, paired with the current (AFAIK) page three:

You see what I mean.

On the other hand, sometimes he replaces a page I really like.  For instance, I really like both versions of p. 15:

And of p. 20:

So the process of replacement is a loss, too.  At least sometimes.

Not all of the replaced pages are originaly from the 1970 edition; some pages he has replaced more than once.  So far as I can tell (I don't have access to all the editions) these are often great pages replacing equally great pages (or nearly so).  (I should say at this point that not all of Phillips' treatment of this book is even part of the Humument project.  He's done altered pages of Mallock's novel separately, as part of other projects, e.g. as part of an illustrated version of Dante he did.)  What's really wanted is A Complete Humument, with all the versions of all the pages included.  Perhaps someday someone will publish one.

In the meantime, it's a marvelous book, highly, highly recommended.

Which leads me to the first of the three pieces of exciting Humument news.

1. The Fifth Edition of A Humument Has Been Published

Two years ago (why does no one tell me these things?) Phillips published his Fifth Edition (not counting, as always, the original, small-press, Zeroith edition.  So you can go buy it & read it.  It's great.

But what if you don't want that book?  That leads us to...

2. A Humument has an Ap (= an Ebook version)

Yes, there is an iPad — and iPhone — version of A Humument.  It seems to be based largely on the Fifth Edition (op. cit.), but also has brand-new, never-before-seen pages.  — Actually, I haven't checked out the iPhone version, but given Phillips's record, I have no confidence that the art in the two Aps are at all identical.

I just downloaded the iPad version.

It has one feature — an "not-too-serious oracle", which displays two paired random pages (a feature which Phillips seems very taken with) — not in the book, although I suppose you could flip through the book and pick two pages.  Or roll a 367-sided die, twice.  Or something,

It also has one flaw: it doesn't seem to remember your place if you close & reopen the ap — there's no bookmark function.  (It does, fortunately, have a "go to" function, albeit not one with the easiest to use UI.)  Or maybe I've just missed it so far.

But mostly it's the latest version of A Humument, with all the astonishing brilliance that implies, as an ebook.  (And about 1/3 - 1/4 of the price of the paperback.)  So go ahead and get that, too.

Still, it would be nice to see various versions of a single page, wouldn't it?

Which leads us to...

3. A Humument had an art show, and it's now online.

Through most of 2013 — and I really rue that I only found this out in 2014 (why does no one tell me these things?) — there was a show of A Humument up at the Mass MoCA museum in North Andover, Massachusetts.  The show displayed two versions of each page (it doesn't seem they ever included more than two, which is a pity).  They also presented the unaltered version of Mallock's book along with them.

Yeah, it's over.  It sucks.  But: they now have an online gallery of it.

With three versions of each page: Mallock's unaltered, and two by Phillips.  (A few of the latter versions — maybe 1/10? — are missing, perhaps to encourage you to buy the book and/or ap, which you should do anyway.)  But it's A Humument.  Twice.  Online.

'Nuff said.

Go see it. It's one of the great books — great art projects — great nested collection of various related....

Aw hell.  Who knows what it is.  But whatever it is, it's one of the great ones of our time.

Update:

Here are some Humument-related links from my bookmarks folder.

• The introduction to the fifth edition, from the main Humument page.
• A set of essays on A Humument, from ibid.
• You got the part where two complete versions of A Humument are online, right?
• Review from the Boston Globe.
• Review from the London Review of Books.
• LRB's interview with Tom Phillips.
• Review from The Kenyon Review.
• Kenyon Review's interview with Tom Phillips.

Enjoy.

Quote Unquote

Here are some interesting things I've read recently.  If you like the quoted bits, click through, because you'll probably like the rest too.  Most of these links via twitter, which I am still enslaved to by the power of the Dark Lord using, even post-election.  (Update: several quotes added.)

On race in George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series:

...the troubling thing about the Dothraki isn’t how different they are from the Westerosi.  It’s how similar they all are to each other.... In Martin’s “non-Anglo” cultures, and in Orientalist literature more generally, the layers are collapsed.  The individuals don’t move within their society, rather, they are fully-formed instances of their society....

This is where Martin’s depiction of cultural “otherness” becomes fascinating to me, because I think it actually tells us something profound about our own internal models of cultural difference.  We don’t think of our own culture as the be-all and end-all of our abilities and opinions. We see ourselves as free agents operating within a culture, and because we accord ourselves that freedom we tend to accord it to other people in our culture as well.  But when it comes to other cultures, we have much more of a tendency to see people simply as tokens or instances of the broader cultural category they come from, which means that their “is known” and “I know” are collapsed. Most of us try to guard against this kind of thinking, as it’s pretty much textbook racial stereotyping. But it’s not hard to slip, and I think this is illustrated by how easy it is not to be bothered by Martin’s world. Lots of people roll their eyes at this aspect of the books, but it all pretty much works as storytelling.

-- Stokes, It is known — Game of Thrones, the Orient, and Conventional Wisdom

On giving away ebooks with the dead-trees version (via; see also)

What indie rock bands have figured out is that the purchase of music does not have to be an either/or proposition. They don’t make their customers choose between analog or digital. Whenever you buy a record from just about any indie band, it comes with either a CD or with a card that contains a URL and a download code so you can get a digital copy at no additional cost.... And guess what? This strategy works: vinyl is in resurgence....

Hardcovers books have similar characteristics to vinyl records. They can be bought in independent book stores that often have knowledgeable staff. The physical artifact is a pleasure to hold and to read. It has a fidelity that is not yet matched via the digital medium. There is a ritual to taking a book off the shelf, settling into a favorite chair, and losing oneself in the text. And like the vinyl record before it, the hardcover book is losing ground to digital formats. According the Association of American Publishers, as reported in GalleyCat, 2012 is the first year that revenues from e-book sales will eclipse that of hardcovers. E-books are gaining traction in the market for the same reasons that digital music has become the dominant format: convenience. It is more convenient to simply press a “Download to Kindle” button than to trudge out to the bookstore (as pleasant as it might be once you are there) or even to order a physical book online. It is also far more convenient to pack a single Kindle with multiple books on it as opposed to packing numerous physical books when traveling...

There are likely many people like myself who prefer a solid hardcover. I like the feel of it, am more comfortable reading on paper as opposed to a screen, and I sleep better knowing that it will probably not mysteriously vanish from my bookshelf if the computer system at the bookstore I purchased it from doesn’t like my travel patterns. However, given that I do travel a lot, carrying a heavy hardcover (or three) around is just not practical. Just as with music, I like the analog edition and am willing to pay more for it, but I am not going to choose it over the vastly more convenient digital edition – and I am most certainly not going to buy both. So why are publishers making their best customers choose and watching idly as they do in fact choose, in increasing numbers, a format that is not as lucrative for publishers and that is rapidly leading to an over-reliance on a small number of distributors?

-- Michael Clarke, "What Can Publishers Learn from Indie Rock?"

On the supposed "New Republicans":

There has been a lot of talk since the election about the possible emergence of a new faction within the Republican party, or at least among the conservative intelligentsia. These new Republicans, we’re told, are willing to be more open-minded on cultural issues, more understanding of immigrants, and more skeptical that trickle-down economics is enough; they’ll favor direct measures to help working families.

So what should we call these new Republicans? I have a suggestion: why not call them “Democrats”?

...On economic issues the modern Democratic party is what we would once have considered “centrist”, or even center-right. Obama’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired health care plan is to the right of Richard Nixon’s. Nobody with political influence is suggesting a return to pre-Reagan tax rates on the wealthy. Fantasies about Obama as a socialist, redistributionist hater of capitalism bear no more resemblance to reality than fantasies about his birthplace or religion.

-- Paul Krugman, "The New Republicans"

On the conservatives are against big government myth:

The conservative movement is not about small government, it is about privatized government. From Bush and Ryan's attempts to privatize Social Security, to turning Medicare into a Groupon, to bringing private industry into the military, every step involves introducing market agents into government processes and pushing market risk to individuals. This continued under Mitt Romney's big policy ideas. He had an idea for taking our system of unemployment insurance and turning it into a system of private unemployment savings accounts. He wanted to fix higher education costs by expanding the for-profit industry, which would "hold down the cost of education," even though they are far more expensive than their non-profit equivalents.

-- Mike Konczal, "What Are Conservatives Getting Wrong About the Economy? (Douthat Reply Edition)"

On the next step after the current assault in Gaza:

Since the bombing began, both sides have asked how this ends. If the answer is something other than with a repetition in a few more years—a perpetual state of war—Israelis must wrestle with the question of their own identity. No, that question is not the clichéd one: Does Israel have a right to exist? Rather, the more imperative question is: Is the way in which Israel exists—as an occupier, a colonizer, and ultimately, as an apartheid state—right? Is there another solution, involving a single, democratic state?

...Moving forward, what is needed is a fundamental change in the way Israelis view their relations with Palestinian Arabs. Yes, Palestinians have a role and will continue to fight for their rights in hopes of achieving a just and peaceful outcome. But at this stage it is Israel—and only Israel—that controls the ever changing realities on the ground. It would be easy for Israeli leaders to postpone facing this reality, but it would also be cowardly. The onus is on them.

-- Yousef Munayyer, "When the Smoke Clears in Gaza"

On superheroes, the status quo, and imagining change:

Graeber points out that the superheroes are always seeking to maintain the status quo, even though the status quo is not by any means fair or just in its own right. It’s as if they don’t have the imagination to think of how things could be changed for the better.

Reading this, I realized that this is a fundamental pattern: It’s easier to say what you don’t want than what you want. It’s easier to point out the problems with other people’s solutions than it is to suggest your own. It’s easier to rally to fight something you disagree with that it is to organize around a shared vision of what could be. In short: Fighting is easy. Creating is hard.

Imagination is a very sensitive thing. If you think too much about how things could be different, you tend to get bummed out about how impossible it seems to change them. And if you tell people around you how you’d like things to be different, they might call you a dreamer or a communist or a utopianist. And they’ll probably laugh at you.

In a way, we’re all just super-villains with low self-esteem. We’re so unused to imagining how the world could be any different that it takes a lot of courage even to try. And even more so when we decide to act upon our ideas to affect the change we want to see in the world.

-- Andreas Lloyd, "Fighting is Easy. Creating is Hard."

(That essay will justifiably annoy superhero fans who will note that this has, in fact, been one of the major themes of many of the best superhero stories over the past quarter century, and that it's written without any evident knowledge of that fact.  Still worth reading, though.  Also note that the David Graeber piece that Lloyd jumps off of is this one, which I previously linked here along with other similarly themed pieces.)

And, from the New Yorker, Le Blog de Jean Paul Sartre:

I was awakened this morning by the sound of an insistent knocking at my door. It was a man in a brown suit. He seemed to be in a hurry, as if Death itself were pursuing him.

“One always dies too soon—or too late,” I told him. “And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are—your life, and nothing else.”

“Okay,” he said. “But I’m just the UPS guy.”

“Oh,” I said. “I— Oh.”

“Sign here,” he said.

“I thought you were a harbinger of Death,” I told him.

“I get that a lot,” he said...

-- Bill Barol, "Le Blog de Jean Paul Sartre"

On writing and literature:

Writerly vanity is like a vicious dog chained up outside the house. You try to starve and neglect the dog into silence, but sometimes he becomes so clamorous that he must be fed if you’re going to be able to ignore him again.

-- Adam Kirsch, "Rocket and Lightship"

-- I hesitate to endorse this piece, as it is (in my view) deeply uneven, containing some wonderful parts but also some sheer rubbish, and a fair amount of grandiose preening.  I'm not even sure if the good outweighs the bad.  But the good has its own merits that are not tarnished by the bad, in recognition of which I thought I'd link.

On the lie that we need to cut social security, medicare and medicaid:

...in the future, we will be able to afford all the health care we consume today, plus all the other stuff we consume today, and then some. That means that, for example, seniors can enjoy the same level of health benefits that they enjoy today, and the rest of us can still be better off than we are now. And it isn't even close. Forty years from now we will be, on average, twice as well-off as we are today....

So the real point isn't that we can't afford Social Security and Medicare. It's that some people don't want to pay the higher taxes necessary to maintain Social Security and Medicare. This is a question of distribution, pure and simple.

...When people say that we can't afford our entitlement programs, they're really saying that rich people won't pay the taxes necessary to sustain our entitlement programs.

-- James Kwak, "The U.S. Does Not Have a Spending Problem, We Have a Distribution Problem"

On the claim that Hamas targets civilians while Israel does not:

And as one of those civilians who used to be targeted on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I have no problem saying that intentionally targeting civilians is wrong—is, in fact, a war crime.... But I weary of the desperate clinging to the word “unintentional” on my side of this decades-long war....

Whether these corpses can be considered collateral damage, accidents, the unintended outcome of well-targeted efforts—simply no longer matters to me. When your state has piled up more than 3000 dead bodies, more than 1,300 of them the bodies of children, it simply no longer matters.

If we accept at face value the idea that Israel takes every possible precaution to preclude civilian deaths (a notion I cannot help but question when I read reports like this, and this, and this), then we are left with only one possible explanation: Rank, criminal incompetence.

If we reject the idea of incompetence (though I have yet to meet a human being incapable of serious error), then we are left with only one other possible explanation: Rank, criminal indifference.

I can already hear the protests that Hamas and other militants hide among civilians, that they are really to blame for these deaths, that it’s not Israel’s fault—and I do not deny that Palestinian extremists share the blame.

But is it really “hiding among civilians” to go to your own house? Is it really “hiding among civilians” to drive down a residential street?

And what if the shoe were on the other foot? Are we willing to say that Israeli soldiers are “hiding among civilians” when they ride city buses, or that Israel’s Defense Ministry is “hiding among civilians” because it’s located in the very heart of Tel Aviv? Yes, Hamas are terrorists and the IDF is a state’s army—but are military targets in civilian locales legitimate, or not?

-- Emily L. Hauser, "Incompetence or Indifference?"

The Superhero Genre Invades the Last Remaining Outpost of Literary Culture

...The New Yorker: nay, one better: the poetry section of The New Yorker!

I mean, they've long since left their origin-story fortress in comics and taken up in their new base in films; they have made many forays into literary fiction; but surely highbrow, snobbish poetry sections of major magazines were safe? No: nothing can stop The SuperheroMan™!

Here's the poem in question:

The Chameleon

Alone among the superheroes,
He failed to keep his life in balance.
Power Man, The Human Shark – they knew
To hold their days and nights in counterpoise,
Their twin selves divided together,
As a coin bears with ease its two faces.

Not so The Chameleon. He was
Too many things to count, and was counted on
To be too many things. When he came to grief,
As was perhaps inevitable,
His body was overlooked for hours,
Having been pressed by force of habit

Into the likeness of what had killed him.

-- David Orr

Actually a pretty good poem, I think.

Now, I'll do David Orr the courtesy of presuming that he's willing to cop to working within the superhero genre proper. But I have to guess that the editor who bought it thought of it as a supercilious parody piece, looking down its nose on superheroes.*

But what's amazing is how true that's not. This isn't remotely a satire on, or cynical reworking of, or in any other way a distanced version of the genre. There's just nothing like that version of the superhero genre (which is itself, whether it likes it or not (and sometimes it doesn't), part of, indeed at this point a major element of, the genre), one which has been common in mainstream (and other) comics for a quarter century, and which has also been found, albeit less prominently, in film and mainstream fiction and so forth. It's simply a use of the superhero genre to -- well, sort of tell a story, I guess, but mostly to make a poem.

My imagined version of Orr's editor might leap in at this point to insist that no, this is a metaphor. It's not a real superhero piece! A point which could only be made by someone more or less completely ignorant of the superhero genre, given that so many of its core examples are meant metaphorically in basically the same way as this poem clearly is.

So The New Yorker has not only published a poem which mentions superheroes: it has published a straightforward, honest-to-Superman superhero genre piece. As a poem.

Wow. So maybe the Mayan apocalypse is going to happen on schedule after all?

Incidentally, some of the readers of this poem -- hell, maybe even Orr's editor, or even Orr himself -- may believe that the superheroes mentioned herein are fictional... well, no, everyone knows they're fiction. What I mean of course is that people may believe they're original creations of Orr: that he picked these names (rather than, say, Superman and Spider-Man) because they're not preexisting characters -- nor, from a legal point of view, trademarks.** This is, however, false.

Power Man, of course, is a long-established a fairly prominent Marvel superhero (albeit a second-stringer compared to, say, Spider-Man or Wolverine):

Apparently a movie staring Power Man is in development.

And The Chameleon is an equally well-established Marvel Comics character -- albeit a super-villain***, not a a superhero -- having debuted in no less historical an issue than Amazing Spider-Man #1:

Chameleon doesn't seem to have gotten a movie yet, although he's appeared in several tv versions.

Only "The Human Shark" seems to have no direct predecessor in professionally produced works in the superhero genre (although that doesn't mean that he has no predecessor in comics). And The Shark is an established DC comics villain:

And while he's not called The Human Shark, he does seem to be a human shark (according to the text in the image above, he's "an actual tiger shark struck by an unknown form of radiation that in a matter of minutes carried him billions of years up the evolutionary scale, giving him the form of a human -- but retaining in him his vicious, predatory nature."), so points for that.

This has been the illustrated edition of The New Yorker's poetry section.

Update: Reading this post over a day after I wrote it (including, of course, the poem quoted in it) I am drawn to woner whether Orr understands that the notion of a superhero who has "failed to keep his life in balance", one for whom it is not at all true that "they knew/To hold their days and nights in counterpoise,/Their twin selves divided together,/As a coin bears with ease its two faces", is not in the least original with him, but is, in fact, a central recurring trope in the superhero genre. The problem of "bear[ing] with ease... two faces" is the thematic core of a great many superhero stories, and indeed some superheros are designed primarily to fall into that question. I missed this the first time -- and, again, maybe I'm wrong -- but it seems from the poem like Orr doesn't know this. It adds a superciliousness that I didn't hear the first time I read it -- something which, I must admit, makes me like the poem somewhat less (although I still like it, to be sure).

(Incidentally, it seems to me that one mark of a true superhero geek is that, upon reading the line "As a coin bears with ease its two faces", they will think of Two-Face and his signature coin...)

________________
* I have no evidence for this. Quite possibly I'm doing someone a disservice. If so, my sincere apologies.

** Unlike, incidentally, the word "superhero" itself, which (I believe) is still trademarked jointly by Marvel and DC -- a ludicrous example of intellectual property overreach, and one that I applaud The New Yorker (presuming their fact checkers turned it up) for ignoring.

*** I wonder if Marvel & DC think they've trademarked "super-villain" too?

A Brilliant Ad, and a Missed Opportunity

So for those of you who (like me) did not watch the superbowl, and who (like me) are a child of the 80s, this (extended version of a) superbowl commercial is highly, highly recommended:



Fabulous.

But I really can't believe they didn't work in the quote "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up." I mean, that was a total !@#$%ing gimme. According to this site, the licence plate reads "SOCHOIC" in honor of that. But it's really totally insufficient. You had to have the man say it. How could they not? (Were they scared of the implications of "if you have the means"? I hope not -- it's just so pathetic -- but I can't think of any other reason...)

(The article at that link, by the way, spells out all the references for anyone who might need a refresher.)

Slandering My Good Name

My name, of course, being "Frug". It's a name of Russian-Jewish extraction -- my paternal grandfather used to say that we were related to the Yiddish poet Simon Frug (1860 - 1916)*, although my father doubts this, and I have no hard evidence either way. As far as I know, every Frug in the western hemisphere (a small number) is related to me, some quite distantly of course.

Now, the other famous meaning of "frug" is in reference to the 60s dance craze of The Frug. For all practical purposes, the dance hasn't been done by anyone in half a century, but it comes up from time to time in popular culture -- the most prominent case, I suppose, being the Rilo Kiley song "The Frug". But other references -- often in the gerund form, "frugging" -- pop up from time to time. Wikipedia's entry on the dance has a lengthy list of them (at least as of now, until some pompous, killjoy editor decides the list lacks importance). I've previously mentioned that the late writer Thomas M. Disch told me he wrote a pseudonymous story called "If You Don't Frug Baby Then What Do You Do?" which he described as the worst thing he'd ever written.

So: a forgotten (and seemingly bad*) poet, and a forgotten (and seemingly silly) dance craze. And my family. I can live with that.

But then, earlier this week, I read the following (via):

According to complaints on consumer-focused Web sites, some American Solutions calls begin with slanted polling questions before proceeding to a request for money. The tactic, known as "fundraising under the guise of research," or frugging, is discouraged as unethical by trade groups such as the Marketing Research Association. (emphasis mine)

"Frugging" a slimy fundraising tactic! Aghast! I've been slandered!!

Ah, but it gets worse. Trying to dig a bit into this usage, I stumbled upon the entry for "Frug" in Urban Dictionary. There are references to the dance, of course, and references to the words as short for "frugal" (I've heard that one before too -- I believe the Frugal Gourmet is called "The Frug"), but then there's also this:

2. fat, retarded, ugly.
3a. A person who is extremely tight-fisted with money. Considered cheap, miserly, penny-pinching, selfish. Always has a negative connotation - thrifty would not be a synonym.
4. An exclamation used exclusively when you've accidentally just agreed to go on a date with someone that you consider to be repugnant.***

...and a few more which are even more obscure or odd and which frankly I doubt have ever been used in human speech.

Trying to come up with an appropriate response to these vile slanders, I am reminded of a quote from an old episode of the TV show Babylon 5 (of which I was, at one time, a great fan):

I don't know who's been saying these things but I want you to know when we get back I am gonna sue somebody! I don't know how -- and I don't know who -- but by God I am gonna sue somebody!

-- Lyta Alexander, in "Between the Darkness and the Light", by J. Michael Straczynski

Word.

__________________________
* I've read a handful of his poems in translation, and they're all pretty bad. It's hard to know in translation of course -- it's possible the originals were better -- but the one person I've ever run into to read Frug in the original** confirmed to me that no, he was, in fact, simply a bad poet.

** A rabbi at my school (he was, much later, to read the Ketubah at my wedding) who, upon being first introduced to me, exclaimed "Frug! Famous name! Famous Yiddish poet!" and then walked around introducing me to people as "Stephen FRUG" the way one might say "Stephen WHITMAN" or something, which puzzled everyone else in the room since, as with the great mass of humanity (even the great mass of Jews) none of them had ever heard of the poet.

*** I have to admit that this notion -- accidentally agreeing to go on a date -- is so bizarre and amusing that I'm almost willing to forgive someone for ascribing a bad version of it to my name. (Almost.) It's a hard scenario to imagine; here's the sample dialogue from the Urban Dictionary entry:

Other person: "Hey, so, uh, what are you doing this Saturday night?"
You: "Oh, nothing much. Going to Coffee Shop X to study, probably."
Other person: "See you there!"
You: "Frug!"

Something To Look Forward To...

The buzz on the internet this morning:

....there was some speculation that it could be a hoax (the title certainly would fit), but Nathan Fillion, who broke the news, has confirmed that it's real. (Apparently he's playing Dogberry.) And then so Maurissa Tancharoen did too. And of course Whedon has spoken often in interviews of the Shakespeare reading groups he does with his friends (including people he casts in his TV projects). So I'm guessing it's legit.

So, uh, yay!!

More here.

Update (10/25): So this news is everywhere now -- like, even in the newspaper of record. (Are they still that?) Unsurprisingly, Whedonesque is the place to go for all your MAAN news. The juciest single news source I've seen on it is this interview with Whedon, Sean "Dr. Tam" Maher and Amy "Fred/Illyria" Acker. Apparently the film is in black and white -- which is cool (I wonder if that was a purely aesthetic decision, or if it was also financial?). And it was shot entirely at Joss's own house -- which, who knew, was designed by his wife Kai, who's an architect.

The full cast list is in the official press release, but I'm going to quote this blog post which lists the actors and parts along with Whedon-fan-friendly identifications:

Amy Acker (Angel) will play Beatrice and Alexis Denisof (Angel) will play Benedict. Fran Kranz (Dollhouse) will play Claudio and newcomer Jillian Morgese (The Avengers) will play Hero. Nathan Fillion (Firefly) is Dogberry, Clark Gregg (The Avengers) is Leonato, Reed Diamond (Dollhouse) is Don Pedro.

Additionally, Sean Maher (Firefly) is Don Juan (the villain of the piece), and Tom Lenk (Andrew from Buffy/Angel) plays Verges. And that's it for Whedon alums that I can see on the list.

I don't know Gregg, 'cause The Avengers hasn't come out yet, or Morgese, 'cause she's a "newcomer" (how'd she get so lucky?), but the others are all fun to imagine in their respective roles.

Xu Bing's Book from the Ground

I'll get around to the explanation in a minute, but the main thing I wanted to do in this post is to quote the first paragraph of an avant-garde novel-in-progress, The Book From the Ground, by the contemporary artist Xu Bing. (The first name is pronounced -- very, very roughly -- like "shoe".*) So before I explain anything, let me quote the opening paragraph:

Go on. Read it. Yes, you can. Really. Just try. ... ... See? That wasn't that hard, was it?

-- that last of which is (if I understand it) precisely the point.

Xu Bing -- who was born in China, moved to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, but who seems to have recently repatriated to China -- is a conceptual artist. My experience of his work, however, differs from my experience of most conceptual artists in that I find that he's actually working with interesting concepts. The work which (as I understand it) really made his name was A Book From the Sky, which is described on the artist's site as follows:

An all-enveloping textual environment, "A Book from the Sky" is composed of massive sheets of Chinese characters, some left loose and some bound into books, which are suspended form the ceiling, pasted on the wall, and laid on the floor. Everything about "A book from the Sky" has the look of authenticity. Form its arrangement of headings and marginalia on the page to its string bindings and indigo covers, the work mimics in every detail the characteristics of traditional Chinese printing and book -making. While donning such a guise, however, "A book form the sky " is supremely inauthentic. Its characters are purely of the artist's invention and utterly without meaning. What is most [unsettling] perhaps is the way in which Xu Bing's characters approximate the real thing , for the artist has composed them from the variant parts that make up Chinese characters.**

The coolness factor here is a bit hard to grasp unless you understand the way in which Chinese characters are made from parts of other Chinese Characters, but if you do get this, it seems pretty cool indeed. (Or shocking -- apparently his work was very controversial when first displayed.)

The Book From the Ground -- a project begun eight years ago and still ongoing -- is conceived as a sort of thematic sequel (sidequel? something) to the previous work. Here's how Xu Bing describes the origins of the project on its associated web site:

Book from the Ground is a novel written in a "language of icons" that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years. Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life... This project first began with my collecting safety manuals from a number of airlines... Then, in 2003, I noticed three small images on a pack of gum (they translate into please use your wrapper to dispose of the gum in a trashcan), and came to realize that in so far as icons alone can explain something simple, they can also be used to narrate a longer story. From that point on, through various channels, I began to collect and organize logos, icons, and insignia from across the globe, and I also began to research the symbols of expression employed by the specialized fields of mathematics, chemistry, physics, drafting, musical composition, choreography, and corporate branding, among others...

Xu Bing then connects this to earlier (in and of themselves false) descriptions of Chinese as a universal language:

In 1627, the French thinker Jean Douet, in an essay titled "Proposal to the King for a Universal Script, with Admirable Results, Very Useful to Everyone on Earth," first suggested that Chinese was a potential model for an international language. The word "model" is important here because Douet does not limit this "universal script" to the form of Chinese characters per se. He instead focuses on the universal potential of the system of recognition upon which the Chinese language is based. Today, nearly four hundred years later, human communication has indeed evolved in the direction predicted by Douet. We have come to sense that traditional spoken forms are no longer the most appropriate method for communication. And, in response, great human effort has been concentrated on developing ways to replace traditional written languages with icons and images. For this reason, among others, humankind has entered the age of reading images.

And lastly connects the project with his own previous work:

I have created many works that relate to language. This subject first took shape twenty years ago with a piece called Book from the Sky. It was called Book from the Sky because it contained a text legible to no one on this earth (including myself). Today I have used this new "language of signs" to write a book that a speaker of any language can understand; I call it Book from the Ground. But, in truth, these two texts share something in common: regardless of your mother tongue or level of education, they strive to treat you equally. Book from the Sky was an expression of my doubts regarding extant written languages. Book from the Earth is the expression of my quest for the ideal of a single script. Perhaps the idea behind this project is too ambitious, but its significance rests in making the attempt.

(Despite the length of those excerpts, the full essay is, in fact, much longer -- click through if you want to read more.)

Whether he's successful or not you can yourself judge. Certainly the above passage is comprehensible to me -- and, I suspect, will be comprehensible to many people who speak no English, so it's not that language that's clarifying it for me. (I have doubts about its universality -- it seems to me to be a sort of "language" of its own -- but I agree with Xu Bing that the attempt itself is worthy.)

I should forewarn anyone who wants to read more, however, that the web site's navigation is a bit counter intuitive -- I suppose Xu Bing didn't spend as much time clarifying that as he did trying to clarify his symbolic language. If you go to the web site and click on the "read" icon, you are directed to this page, which is called (in the web browser) "basic", which contains a six paragraph text (can I call it a text?) of which the above-quoted paragraph is the opening. This text is titled, appropriately enough, "". But there's no indication of any further text -- at first I thought that that brief passage was the entirety of the work. If you then click again on the "reading" icon, however, it takes you to this table of contents, which lists fourteen chapters (by number only), with a final page promising "to be continued". There isn't any indication (that I've seen) about the relationship between the initial text and the fourteen numbered chapters. I've only carefully read the former, so I may well be missing something, but a brief scan of the latter makes it seem like the original text is a sort of proof-of-concept sketch, which is then elaborated in (rather than continued in) the first chapter of the actual book.

Still, if you're looking to read more, you'll want to go beyond just the first page.

Since the table of contents lists only numbers, but the actual pages themselves have chapter titles (all in Xu Bing's symbolic language, naturally), I thought it might be of some small service if I were to provide a hyperlinked table of contents to the work as it exists so far:

Preface (?):
Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:
Chapter 3:
Chapter 4:
Chapter 5:
Chapter 6:
Chapter 7:
Chapter 8:
Chapter 9:
Chapter 10:
Chapter 11:
Chapter 12:
Chapter 13:
Chapter 14:

There it is, if you wish to read it. As with many tables of contents, I think you get at least a hint of the story's shape just from the titles. I can't recommend it -- again, all I myself have read is what I'm calling the "preface" -- which is interesting as language, but not so interesting as story. But it looks like the longer version may well improve on that latter score. Someday soon I hope to find out.

A post script: two categorical queries

Is The Book From the Ground a Oulipian work, i.e. a work of constrained literature?

I would say it is not. It is an experimental work, certainly, but not I think "constrained" in the sense that that term is used by the Oulipo and its adherents. I can imagine some disagreement on this point -- the Oulipo has done some work on altered languages, such as Jaques Jouet's "The Great-Ape Love-Song" (published in English translation in Oulipo Laboratory). Nevertheless, it seems to me that a newly-invented language -- particularly one not related to any existing language, but pictorial in origin -- while involving, as every task does, certain constraints, is clearly not constrained literature in any plausible sense.

Is The Book From the Ground comics under the McCloudian definition ("juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer"***)?

Again, I would say no. It's not that I am unwilling to apply McCloud's -- to my mind, extremely fruitful -- definition broadly. (In fact, I have been criticized for doing so in the past (see comments.)) But it seems to me that Xi Bing's work is clearly not comics in any plausible sense of the spirit of the term (again, in McCloud's usage).

Again, I can imagine some disagreement here: one might say that Xu Bing's work consists entirely of "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer", so if it is not comics, then does it not represent a plain counter-example to McCloud's definition? I would say it does not, because what Xu Bing is doing ultimately is repurposing what were pictures and other images into a symbolic language, i.e. by the time he's "written" his "texts" what he's working with are no longer images in the sense that McCloud intends.

That said, I think that you could make a plausible argument to the contrary, and either understand what Xi Bing is doing as comics (it is derived, as noted above, from airline instruction manuals and the like, which McCloud does specifically include in his understanding of comics), or tweak McCloud's definition to exclude it (which risks accusations of monster-baring, but may be the best way to go). Alternatively, you could understand Xi Bing as taking comics and changing it into a textual language -- see it not as comics, but as a derivation of one particular form of them. This might be the most accurate approach.

Did you include this entire postscript just as an excuse to tag this post with "ou-x-po" and "comics", since you thought Xi Bing's work would be of interest to those interested in those categories, despite the fact that it isn't, basically, either Oulipian or comics?

We said just two questions.

________________
* I haven't seen any site which prints that in proper pinyin, i.e. with tones marked, or I'd reproduce that. Without tones, the pinyin doesn't give sufficient information to pronounce his name. (If anyone happens to know, please leave the information in comments! If it helps, his name in Chinese (according to Wikipedia) is 徐冰.)

** Be grateful I cut off the quote before he started talking about "deconstructive bricolage".

*** Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 9.

Extremely Cool Online Toy of the Day (Flagged for Photographers)

Via Andrew Sullivan, here is the coolest online toy I've seen in a while: pictures that you can focus after taking them -- changing the focus in various ways. Here, try one out:



Try clicking the flower in the far foreground (lower right); then click the flower in the medium foreground (the one sticking out in the upper left of the flower field); then click the background proper, the trees or the beach. Three different pictures.

Sadly, this isn't just a plug-in you can get for photoshop on a standard camera; it's a design for a camera, and one that's still in beta-testing, and not yet generally available. Still, something to look out for! (I wish I had one for my current project...)

Here's a NY Times story on it with more information (basically an extended press release, but hey, sometimes those are interesting (which is why I'm putting up an abbreviated one on my blog...). And if you click through to their web site, you can play with a couple dozen pictures like the one above. According to their faq, the camera isn't for sale yet (and they're not saying when or how much), but it sounds like they're working on it. Maybe later this year? Maybe someone wants to buy me a very expensive Christmas/Hanukkah present :)

Can We Have An Update on the Acutal Work of Art, Please?

Apparently Andres Serrano's long-controversial photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) has been destroyed (some news reports have "damaged") by fundamentalist Catholic protesters in France. All the various news stories and blog posts I've seen on this (e.g.) have focused on the culture-war angle -- the photograph has always been controversial, the rise of Christian fundamentalism and so forth; P Z Myers (reasonably) compares this to the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist statuses. Etc.

But I'm primarily worried about the artwork. Can it be repaired? More importantly: Immersion (Piss Christ) was a photograph, which are often (but not always) made in series -- so that there are a handful of "originals" rather than just a single original, as in the case of a painting. Is this true with Serrano's work? Nothing I've seen so far has addressed this, but I'm actually very eager to find out.

Because here's the thing: apart from the politics and the controversy... Immersion (Piss Christ) is a very beautiful work of art. Take a look at it, and try to forget what you know about its origin, and just look at it as an image:

Gorgeous. And also, as many people have noted, a very religious image. Serrano himself has said that "I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious... I am drawn to the symbols of the Church.... I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones." A writer for the Guardian makes a similar point here. Even PZ Myers, not known for his sympathy to religious expression, notes that the "luminous golden glow" is "reverential".

I hasten to add that this shouldn't make a difference: anti-religious art can be as beautiful as religious art, and I hope it goes without saying that the destruction of artwork is immoral whatever viewpoint it promotes or the intention of its artist to shock or not. Saying Serrano's work is religious is a description, not a defense, since I don't think that the claims (blasphemy, offense, intentional sacrilege) against which it would be a defense are ones that in fact require a defense. If those charges are true, it doesn't matter. But, as it happens, I think they're not. Immersion (Piss Christ) is a work of religious art -- one focusing on (among other things) the physicality of the incarnation, with all that that entails.*

But mostly it's beautiful. I've only seen reproductions, which never do a work of art justice, and I'd love to see the original someday. Can I? That is, are there other, still-undamaged originals made by Serrano from the same negative? Or was there only one, and it is truly gone? I'd really like to know. Anyone feel like doing (or linking to) any reporting on this angle?

Update: Telling this story to a photography buff, he assured me that more than one copy of "Piss Christ" was made (photos are often made in series, usually in the 3-12 range I think). So it does still exist, somewhere. Just don't tell the wackos.

______________
* I'm reminded of the line which the late David Foster Wallace quoted from a novel by William H. Gass (which I've not read and know nothing else about), Omensetter's Luck: "The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not."

Super Duck vs. Rabbitman!

Stealing this unbelievably fabulous image directly from Gerry:

Gerry also managed to score the gimme goal by comparing this to Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image:

So what was left for me to do except invoke Super Duck to tie it all together in one great big circle?

Holy Shinola, David Simon Just Won a MacArthur Genius Grant!

Sure, creating a program that has been endlessly referred to as the greatest TV show of all time -- largely although not entirely because it happens to be the plain fact of the matter that it is the greatest fucking TV show of all time -- ought to qualify you as a genius.

But it's nice to know that people with gobs and gobs of money to give away can see that too.

So yay! David Simon won a MacArthur!

Oh, and a bunch of other people did too. None of whom, oddly enough, seem to have created any TV shows. What were we talking about again?

(Links via Canavan and Yglesias.)

Update: Interview with Simon here.

The Photos of John Henry Stassen

My beloved uncle, John Henry Stassen, has been a dedicated and accomplished amateur photographer for many years now. He's just put up a gallery of over a hundred of his photographs, and they're marvelous. They range from the abstract to the romantic to the sharply observed mundane. Accuse me of bias if you like, but I think they're fabulous. To whet your appetite, here are four that I like. (The links go to the photos on his web site.)

Check out the rest here. You can also buy copies should you be so inclined.

Because Sometimes You Just Need To Focus On the Positive...

...so after last post's depressing ruminations, here's a totally cheery quote of the day (via):

...the great consolation of the Oy’s, for me and people like me, was – and I mean this in a healthful, life-affirming way – our ruthless and total conquest of the culture. Science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, vampires, zombies and werewolves are the mainstream now. We own your movie theaters, your TV screens, your bestseller lists, even your highfalutin’ literary awards. Even what’s left of the dread New York Literary Establishment has largely succumbed. The remaining anti-fantasm holdouts no longer have the power to infuriate; they are not even tiresome any more because there aren’t enough of them to tire one. On the very rare occasions when one encounters a supposedly serious critic condemning fantastic fiction out of hand, it’s like discovering an eight-track-tape player in a flea market: you marvel that it might still work, but it’s tempered by realizing that it couldn’t play anything that matters to you these days.

-- Jim Henley

I'm not totally convinced -- at least, not yet -- that Henley's right about this. But it's a cheery thought, and I wanted a cheery thought today. So yeah: geeks rule!

On Kirby, Marvel, Copyright and Moral Claims: Scattered Thoughts

Thoughts on the copyright reclamation by the heirs of Jack Kirby, sparked by this post by Alan David Duane.

(In reading the below, remember I'm neither a lawyer nor a policymaker nor even one who has read the relevant legal documents; I'm going by a (semi-informed, but distinctly) layman's readings of the news stories about them. If that doesn't interest you, bail now.)

1)

The heirs of Jack Kirby have filed a notice of copyright reclamation in the case of superheroes he had a hand in creating for Marvel in the early 1960's, characters such as the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and even Spiderman (who was created by Steve Ditko more than Jack Kirby).

2)

It's important to remember what's going on here. Kirby's heirs aren't suing anyone -- at least not yet. They are filing a notice of reclamation. They are able to do this because of the odd nature of our current lengthy copyright system.

Until 1976, copyrights were good for 56 years -- an automatic 28 with a single optional renewal. In 1976, Congress extended that period -- first to 75 and then later to 95 years (oversimplifying but in essence). This was not only prospective, applying to works copyrighted in 1976 and later, but retroactive, applying to old works too.

But this created an odd situation for those who had sold their copyrights prior to 1976. What they'd sold was copyright as it existed then, i.e. the 56 year term. What to do about the extensions for sold copyrights? Should they belong to the original owner (on the grounds that they only sold the existing copyright of 56 years and not any more), or should they belong to the new purchaser (on the grounds that the purchaser bought the copyright and the extension doesn't affect that)?

(Note that this is also a different legal situation than the one involving DC/Superman/Jerry Siegel's heirs.)

3)

This entire debate is distorted by a broader misconception in our culture about the relation of worth and wealth to merit and effort.

It is a strong cultural myth in our society -- an essential undergirding of one of the two major political philosophies of this country, and an almost-as-important one for the other -- that people who get rich deserved it. They worked hard, or had a good idea, and therefore they made it. Conservatives tend to (implicitly) assume this is the end of the story: if you work hard and/or are smart, you'll get rich; if you're poor, it's your own damn fault. Liberals, in contrast, recognize unfairness and randomness to a degree, so they tend to say that people can work hard and stay poor. But neither side tends to see the fact that wealth is at least a much a matter of chance and luck as it is of merit or effort.

The reason we don't like to see that, of course, is that it upends the supporting intellectual assumptions of most of our society: if the rich are simply lucky, then the enormous favor they receive is unearned and unfair.*

This is never more true than when we are talking about intellectual property.

I'm not (repeat, not) saying that artistic merit has no relation to how well a work does. But it's been extensively argued on theoretical grounds, amply seen throughout history and shown in controlled laboratory studies that merit is, at best, a necessary but not sufficient factor. Harry Potter may have been a good series of children's books -- but there are a lot of other books that are equally good (as I've had children's librarians say to me); J. K. Rowling may have been good, but she was mostly very, very lucky.

However true this is of the success of original works, how much more strongly true is it of intellectual properties** which have success in derivative works!

This distorts our discussion in numerous ways. In part it leads to people saying things like

I won't argue with anyone who tells me Herb Trimpe is unlikely to return to Marvel and create a blockbuster, breakthrough character that generates millions of dollars, no matter what sort of compensation deal is in place.

...which implies that the talent and effort of Herb Trimpe (who was the first man to draw (although he did not create) Wolverine) was a major role in Wolverine's becoming a breakthrough character. This is not because of what Herb Trimpe did or didn't do.*** It's because time and chance -- and broad social forces such as create a market for characters such as Wolverine -- and, above all, fashion are what made Wolverine worth what he's worth today.

The fight that will follow over the ownership of the Fantastic Four isn't quite like a fight over a lottery ticket; but it's far, far closer than anyone is granting in this discussion.

4)

There is a third party to every legal battle over intellectual property, one which has neither lawyers nor lobbyists on its side. Thanks to the recent intellectual growth of the copyleft movement, it has some advocates; but their position is largely based on reason and fairness and the public good, and is therefore extremely weak. But it is the most important party nonetheless.

I speak, of course, of the public.

Intellectual property -- a misnomer, really, since there is no thing to be owned -- is a government-enforced monopoly restricting freedom of speech. It restricts your ability to say what you want to say, in person or print or on film or in comics -- if what you want to say is, for example, "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane; I was [REMAINDER DELETED DUE TO DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE]" It equally, and even more indefensibly, to your ability to tell an original story -- if that story is about, for example, Superman or Spiderman.

There are reasons for so limiting speech -- which is why the power to do so is explicitly granted in the Constitution -- but given that it is limiting very basic human rights, the power is moral only insofar as it is necessary to accomplish its stated ends. (Whether or not it is legal is a separate matter.)

5)

The moral case for creators' rights is both essential and irrelevant to the Kirby-copyright issue.

It's irrelevant because neither party has a very good moral (as opposed to legal) claim. On one side we have Kirby's biological heirs; on the other, the corporate descendents of the companies he worked for. Neither set of people had much to do with the effort or talent put into these characters; they are fighting for an inheritance, and like any fight for inheritance they are fighting for things they may have title to but don't in any moral sense particularly deserve.

But it's essential because it was only because of the (perceived) moral rights of creators that copyright was extended in the first place.

If the case before Congress had been that companies wished to extend their intellectual monopolies to make more money from them, then even that bribery-pliant group of sellouts would have a hard time justifying such a vote. So it was all talked up in terms of the struggling, lonely dreamer, hoping to turn his or her talent into a win for his or her heirs.

This was a fiction, of course -- as much of a fiction as the notion that estate taxes hit small farmers rather than wealthy businessmen, and a fiction of the same kind, i.e. a propagandistic one designed to hide the true beneficiaries of public policy. But in terms of the copyright extensions passed in the 1970's, and then again in the 1990's, and then again whenever Mickey Mouse next threatens to go out of copyright, it's an essential one. Without this fiction, the extra value that came from the copyright for years 57 - 95 of an intellectual property simply wouldn't exist -- or would, rather, be held by the public and not by anyone in particular.

This is why you can't say of copyrights what you'd say of, for example, real estate. If you sell a house in a poor neighborhood, and then it becomes trendy, and the owner therefore (through luck) becomes rich, you can't complain that you didn't know its worth when you sold it. But no one seriously doubts (pragmatically if not morally) the perpetual property rights to real estate.****

Whereas the purchasers of these monopolies, which have become valuable only due to chance (and the efforts of thousands, morally and artistically indistinguishable from similar efforts which led nowhere), have any chance of extending them at the expense of the public only by appealing to the moral claim of their creators.

Marvel wants to argue that, for the good of people like Jack Kirby, it must have the right to hold a monopoly on his creations -- against, in this case, his actual heirs. They need the appeal to Kirby's rights to win the broader public debate, and need to squash that same appeal to win the narrow legal one.

The myth that wealth is earned is necessary to make us think that the financial windfall is significantly due to Kirby's talent in the first place, and that this fight over a lottery ticket is a fight over who really deserves it -- blinding us to the real answer, no one.

7)

Artists can't threaten to withhold their next breakthrough character from big companies if they're not fairly compensated, because they have almost no say in whether they can create one. They put their effort and talent into what they make; but what makes it valuable is fashion, and the efforts of others, and luck, and a host of other factors.

Companies have extended copyright based on a myth of the individual creator -- who they are trying to screw over at every other moment so as to make money for themselves.

Of course artists should be fairly compensated for their work -- and there is, as I have said, a very strong pragmatic argument for copyright, one I don't disagree with (assuming that said copyright is, as provided by the U.S. constitution, "for limited terms"). But the vast wealth at stake here is irrelevant to that right, since it is all-but-irrelevant to that success.

And of course companies should be able to get funding to make (say) movies, and then profit from those endeavors. But they want more than that; they want to maintain a public monopoly on the ability to tell stories about certain characters who, for whatever reason, have caught the public's imagination, so that not only can they make and profit from stories about their characters, but so that they can ensure that theirs are the only stories about those characters that are there to be told.

8)

Since I'm not a lawyer or policymaker, but simply a citizen with opinions on public policy, I can say that I support neither Kirby's heirs nor DC/Marvel. I think that, 56 years after their creation, all works should be in the public domain. The supreme court, alas, disagrees -- which seems to mean little more than their unwillingness to open the can of worms of recognizing that our current Congressional system is so poisoned by legalized bribery that no judgments of Congress (or the President, or really the Courts) can be understood as representing the public interest save incidentally. They said it was Congress's call to make -- which would have been a reasonable argument if Congress wasn't bought and paid for by the stakeholders on one side of this particular issue.

But the Congress was bought and paid for, and the Court was unwilling to enforce the rights of the public. So what we are left with is a debate over who should get to steal from the public the winnings of a lottery.

9)

To anyone not convinced by all of the above:

I have one more argument for my position. It's a knock-down, irrefutable, overwhelming argument, such that if you heard it you could not even begin to imagine disagreeing with me. It would, in fact, revolutionize your thinking on every aspect of this issue.

But since this set of concepts can, as it happens, only be expressed in metaphorical terms as an X-Men story, I'm not legally allowed to share it with you until the X-Men go into the public domain.

Until then, you'll just have to trust me.

Update: Now cross-posted at Alas, a blog. Thanks, Amp!

_______________

* Incidentally, the consequence of this argument isn't necessarily a socialist economy, which I wouldn't actually favor; there are extremely strong pragmatic grounds for favoring the retention of a capitalist system and, as part of that, a robust set of property rights. It's just that such a system should be supplemented by a far stronger redistributory state (in a tax-for-social-goods-sense) than is true of the U.S. today; and also (and this is almost as important) that the public culture and debate should recognize the preponderance of luck in the outcomes of economic lives.

** What a vile phrase.

*** Although in fact I think that Wolverine's blockbuster status has far more to do with Chris Claremont, and to a slightly lesser extent Frank Miller, than it does Herb Trimpe or Wolverine's creators -- although Claremont and Miller have even less legal claim than do Wolverine's originators.

**** Except the bible, of course, which wanted everything reset to zero every fifty years to ensure justice (Leviticus 25:13). What socialist commie pinko wrote that, eh?