quasigrecian thoughts
1. The British post-election turmoil continues to be the best political show that country has staged since the implosion of Margaret Thatcher nearly twenty years ago. The hilarious part is that indecisive results like this are the norm in most European countries; only the British have absolutely no idea what to do with one. People who are enjoying pointing at other parties and saying "You lost!" don't seem to realize that nobody else won either. A coalition - either explicit or implicit - of losers is the only thing on offer.
2. At risk of becoming a victim myself, I must express dismay at the gangs of rampaging fan-fiction-writing thugs who are running around beating up on innocent authors who have the temerity to object to other people's stories using their characters and their settings. A description of one sober, principled objection as "panic" is typical. Another bruised victim deleted her posts on the topic only to have an opponent promptly make them reappear from cached copies, nicely demonstrating the monstrous sense of entitlement over other people's words that's under consideration.
2a. There's a lot of logical fallacies from the fan-fiction defense side, too, largely consisting of conflating inspiration and appropriation, or transformation and appropriation, or authorized adaptations and intellectual property squatting, and pretending there's no difference. (Some say it's hypocritical for an objecting author to admit to being inspired by Dr. Who or to sell film rights to HBO. It's nothing of the sort.) Also by playing games with what the term "fan fiction" covers. We may need a more precise term for what the authors are objecting to, but the word is not the thing.
2b. Against that, there's an authorial misbelief that copyrights need to be defended aggressively, like trademarks. No, you won't lose copyright control over your existing work if you don't defend it. But if you don't move against infringing works when you find out about them, you can't sue them later on.
2c. My favorite living and my favorite deceased author have each expressed visceral revulsion against would-be writers playing in their private sandboxes, but none in principle against transformation into other media. I believe this attitude is inherent in their greatness as writers, and I know what side my moral bread is buttered on. There's nothing wrong with playing around with others' fictional creations you love; it's a wholly natural impulse. But for ghod's sake, do it in private, and don't assume that the original author is going to like it, or has to put up with it.
2d. What we are coming to.
3. Also remarkably fallacious, this piece of chronological snobbery. Assuming it's serious at all, but these days who can tell? Argues that the computer mouse is obsolete, not for any concrete reason, but because it was invented nearly 50 years ago, and the keyboard is older then that. What about language, then? That's even older still; should we toss that out too?
4. "Nothing Can Possibly Go Worng" Department. After months of insisting that, if your gas and electricity bills suddenly jump up after the installation of one of the new electronic meters, it's your usage that's changed and you just didn't realize it, because their machines are perfect, the utility PG&E finally admits that the dang things don't work.
5. Music Department. Small-town orchestras and ensembles are usually pretty well-behaved and give sober, unobjectionable, perhaps inspired and perhaps not, renditions. For a really eccentric performance, you have to go to the big city.
5a. Due credit to DGK for having previously identified "spectralism" to me. We had some more of it, just not as good.
5b. I said that the pianist looked "as pale as a teen idol vampire," I did. I did not say that he also looked remarkably like Matthew Gray Gubler, nor that the conductor, a peppery little old guy with a startlingly flushed complexion, looked like a cross between Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley.
2. At risk of becoming a victim myself, I must express dismay at the gangs of rampaging fan-fiction-writing thugs who are running around beating up on innocent authors who have the temerity to object to other people's stories using their characters and their settings. A description of one sober, principled objection as "panic" is typical. Another bruised victim deleted her posts on the topic only to have an opponent promptly make them reappear from cached copies, nicely demonstrating the monstrous sense of entitlement over other people's words that's under consideration.
2a. There's a lot of logical fallacies from the fan-fiction defense side, too, largely consisting of conflating inspiration and appropriation, or transformation and appropriation, or authorized adaptations and intellectual property squatting, and pretending there's no difference. (Some say it's hypocritical for an objecting author to admit to being inspired by Dr. Who or to sell film rights to HBO. It's nothing of the sort.) Also by playing games with what the term "fan fiction" covers. We may need a more precise term for what the authors are objecting to, but the word is not the thing.
2b. Against that, there's an authorial misbelief that copyrights need to be defended aggressively, like trademarks. No, you won't lose copyright control over your existing work if you don't defend it. But if you don't move against infringing works when you find out about them, you can't sue them later on.
2c. My favorite living and my favorite deceased author have each expressed visceral revulsion against would-be writers playing in their private sandboxes, but none in principle against transformation into other media. I believe this attitude is inherent in their greatness as writers, and I know what side my moral bread is buttered on. There's nothing wrong with playing around with others' fictional creations you love; it's a wholly natural impulse. But for ghod's sake, do it in private, and don't assume that the original author is going to like it, or has to put up with it.
2d. What we are coming to.
3. Also remarkably fallacious, this piece of chronological snobbery. Assuming it's serious at all, but these days who can tell? Argues that the computer mouse is obsolete, not for any concrete reason, but because it was invented nearly 50 years ago, and the keyboard is older then that. What about language, then? That's even older still; should we toss that out too?
4. "Nothing Can Possibly Go Worng" Department. After months of insisting that, if your gas and electricity bills suddenly jump up after the installation of one of the new electronic meters, it's your usage that's changed and you just didn't realize it, because their machines are perfect, the utility PG&E finally admits that the dang things don't work.
5. Music Department. Small-town orchestras and ensembles are usually pretty well-behaved and give sober, unobjectionable, perhaps inspired and perhaps not, renditions. For a really eccentric performance, you have to go to the big city.
5a. Due credit to DGK for having previously identified "spectralism" to me. We had some more of it, just not as good.
5b. I said that the pianist looked "as pale as a teen idol vampire," I did. I did not say that he also looked remarkably like Matthew Gray Gubler, nor that the conductor, a peppery little old guy with a startlingly flushed complexion, looked like a cross between Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley.