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Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying, downloadable. To Boon, appropriation and copying are unavoidable, from a Buddhist perspective in which we are all nothing, and we are all copies and transformations at every level of being. This leads him to question the distinctions we draw between copying and originality, real Louis Vuitton handbags and fake ones, plagiarism and original student work. Something I liked:
Machine of Death, Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, & David Malki eds.: Available as a download too, this hefty volume features dozens of stories based on the premise that there exists a machine, infallible but capricious in how it communicates, that can tell people how they will die. “Old age,” for example, sounds good but might involve an elderly person suffering a stroke as she drives and hitting the twenty-year-old victim. The premise is good enough that it can sustain a number of variations, though the stories naturally vary in quality. Some of them focus on twists, while others take seriously what it would be like to know you were going to die of cancer. How would insurers, employers, voters react? (The story about the politician whose card says “exhaustion from sex with a minor” doesn’t quite do the job, unfortunately.) Good quote: Chris Cox, Vegetables: “He took the blood test, and it told him Pavement would be his demise. He never considered that falling off the roof is more probable than the ground swallowing him, but this is none of my business, and something I would be interested in witnessing.” I also liked the story by David Malki about the infomercial producer trying to sell the machines. Heavily but not entirely Western focused; not entirely internally consistent either, if you care, which I didn’t.
Greg Lastowka, Virtual Justice: And a third download. Lastowka provides a brief and accessible introduction to the legal issues surrounding online games, and argues that their status as games matters: where play and pleasure are important, constraints matter at least as much as freedoms, and law generally has something to say about constraints, just as game designers do. He covers contract, property, “hacking,” and intellectual property (mostly copyright). He doesn’t come to many conclusions—law will be important; law will probably come to recognize more than it does now that games can produce valuable property; it will be hard to regulate game makers’ use of contracts to operate essentially as feudal lords, meaning that when push comes to shove players are vassals.
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture: The chapters are pure Marjorie Garber, intelligent and widely read and wide-ranging. If you’re looking for a coherent thesis about any of the plays, methodically explored, you won’t find it here, but you will find a bunch of neat points about how the plays have been received, used, and interpreted over time. Here’s what she covers: The Tempest, especially as the play has been interpreted with reference to colonialism, racism, and gender—is Prospero a hero or a villain? Romeo and Juliet and youth, including the cultural reinterpretation of a “Romeo” to mean an inconstant, indiscriminate lover, rather than the boy in the play who dies for love. Coriolanus and the self who chooses to participate in, or absent itself from, political engagement with others. Macbeth and the necessary difficulties of interpretation, the riddles of the play turning into riddles about the play and Lady MacBeth, like Romeo, losing her grounding in the specifics of the play and turning into a slur applied to any ambitious woman. Richard III and the challenge of fact: Richard tells the audience of his own interiority, but howdo we know what was true of Richard, and why and in what ways do we debate whether Shakespeare’s Richard was “real”? The Merchant of Venice, anti-Semitism, and intention: was Shakespeare an anti-Semite or a man ahead of his time and place in writing Shylock as something other than a stereotypical villain, given how many ways the play has been performed in the service of anti-Semitism and of recuperation? Othello: how did Iago’s conniving words about reputation, uttered in bad faith, come to be understood as important truth (as many of Shakespeare’s phrases said by people who are figures of fun or evil in the text are), and who gets to play Othello in the context of racism and the extensive historical debate about how black Othello really was? (This was probably the least coherent chapter, but they’re all, um, wandering.) Henry V as exemplar of leadership, as shown by his repeated presence in business texts—even though the play itself ends by telling us that his victories were quickly dissipated by his early death. Hamlet and the problem of “character,” including interpreters’ tendency to see themselves in Hamlet and Hamlet in themselves. (My favorite, because Hamlet’s my favorite.) King Lear and its rise to outpace Hamlet as indicator of the despair of the modern condition (as opposed to the modern character).
Carl Elliott, White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine: A really engaging, if depressing, read. Elliott starts with a chapter on human guinea pigs, who lie and are lied to and whose experiences determine what drugs will be available to the general population. He covers medical ghostwriters (and the prominent physicians who allow their names to be put on papers ghostwritten for drug companies), drug sales reps, “thought leaders” who promote drugs for pharmaceutical companies, marketers reaching out to doctors and consumers, and even ethicists, who are now often on the payroll of some corporation or another. Medicine has been commercialized in so many ways that thinking of it as a profession is more distracting than useful. Elliott has no proposals to fix the problems that arise from pervasive self-interest pretending to be objective advice, making the book as worrisome as it is engaging.
Robin McKinley, Pegasus: Free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. The humans of Sylvi’s kingdom have had an alliance with the pegasi for hundreds of years, allowing them to thrive in their rich land and fend off attacks from other magical creatures. But enemies who had been thought exterminated are reappearing, including the dangerous rocs. Meanwhile, Sylvi, as a princess, is to be bound to a pegasus according to the terms of the alliance. But something unusual happens: instead of barely being able to understand one another with the aid of an interpreter, Sylvi and her pegasus can speak clearly to one another, mind to mind. This upsets the human magicians with their monopoly on translation, and Sylvi starts to suspect that something is fundamentally wrong with the alliance. The narrative dragged—Sylvi spends a lot of time angsting and thinking over the same problems again and again—and it ended on a hell of a cliffhanger (that is, something actually happened!). If you were really ready to identify with Sylvi’s specialness, which you might be, then I can imagine enjoying the intense focus on Sylvi’s interiority and her longing to be something other than human: this might be a better coming of age story for people actually closer to coming of age than I am.
Louis Vuitton … work[s] the boundary between fine art and craftsmanship, but also, more importantly, between art and crafts and the commodity and mass production. The company associates its products with the world of fine arts in the hope that the aura of the unique art object will also be transferred to their bags and clothes, enhancing the atmosphere of craftsmanship, which may have existed in the time of Louis Vuitton himself, but which has surely been transformed in the age of global mass production and intellectual-property law. IP law paradoxically, and perhaps impossibly, demands that the discourse of essence, of original expression and uniqueness, be continually asserted in order for a monopoly on the right to mass-produce particular items to be maintained. Copying must be disavowed, aesthetically and legally, even as it supports the entire vast apparatus of production.This book wasn’t for me; I’m not much of a philosopher. But he does draw a lot of provocative connections. From his very interesting blog: “Couldn’t you say that the car plant worker whose job is outsourced is also experiencing a crisis in the way that we relate to copies?”
Machine of Death, Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, & David Malki eds.: Available as a download too, this hefty volume features dozens of stories based on the premise that there exists a machine, infallible but capricious in how it communicates, that can tell people how they will die. “Old age,” for example, sounds good but might involve an elderly person suffering a stroke as she drives and hitting the twenty-year-old victim. The premise is good enough that it can sustain a number of variations, though the stories naturally vary in quality. Some of them focus on twists, while others take seriously what it would be like to know you were going to die of cancer. How would insurers, employers, voters react? (The story about the politician whose card says “exhaustion from sex with a minor” doesn’t quite do the job, unfortunately.) Good quote: Chris Cox, Vegetables: “He took the blood test, and it told him Pavement would be his demise. He never considered that falling off the roof is more probable than the ground swallowing him, but this is none of my business, and something I would be interested in witnessing.” I also liked the story by David Malki about the infomercial producer trying to sell the machines. Heavily but not entirely Western focused; not entirely internally consistent either, if you care, which I didn’t.
Greg Lastowka, Virtual Justice: And a third download. Lastowka provides a brief and accessible introduction to the legal issues surrounding online games, and argues that their status as games matters: where play and pleasure are important, constraints matter at least as much as freedoms, and law generally has something to say about constraints, just as game designers do. He covers contract, property, “hacking,” and intellectual property (mostly copyright). He doesn’t come to many conclusions—law will be important; law will probably come to recognize more than it does now that games can produce valuable property; it will be hard to regulate game makers’ use of contracts to operate essentially as feudal lords, meaning that when push comes to shove players are vassals.
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture: The chapters are pure Marjorie Garber, intelligent and widely read and wide-ranging. If you’re looking for a coherent thesis about any of the plays, methodically explored, you won’t find it here, but you will find a bunch of neat points about how the plays have been received, used, and interpreted over time. Here’s what she covers: The Tempest, especially as the play has been interpreted with reference to colonialism, racism, and gender—is Prospero a hero or a villain? Romeo and Juliet and youth, including the cultural reinterpretation of a “Romeo” to mean an inconstant, indiscriminate lover, rather than the boy in the play who dies for love. Coriolanus and the self who chooses to participate in, or absent itself from, political engagement with others. Macbeth and the necessary difficulties of interpretation, the riddles of the play turning into riddles about the play and Lady MacBeth, like Romeo, losing her grounding in the specifics of the play and turning into a slur applied to any ambitious woman. Richard III and the challenge of fact: Richard tells the audience of his own interiority, but howdo we know what was true of Richard, and why and in what ways do we debate whether Shakespeare’s Richard was “real”? The Merchant of Venice, anti-Semitism, and intention: was Shakespeare an anti-Semite or a man ahead of his time and place in writing Shylock as something other than a stereotypical villain, given how many ways the play has been performed in the service of anti-Semitism and of recuperation? Othello: how did Iago’s conniving words about reputation, uttered in bad faith, come to be understood as important truth (as many of Shakespeare’s phrases said by people who are figures of fun or evil in the text are), and who gets to play Othello in the context of racism and the extensive historical debate about how black Othello really was? (This was probably the least coherent chapter, but they’re all, um, wandering.) Henry V as exemplar of leadership, as shown by his repeated presence in business texts—even though the play itself ends by telling us that his victories were quickly dissipated by his early death. Hamlet and the problem of “character,” including interpreters’ tendency to see themselves in Hamlet and Hamlet in themselves. (My favorite, because Hamlet’s my favorite.) King Lear and its rise to outpace Hamlet as indicator of the despair of the modern condition (as opposed to the modern character).
Carl Elliott, White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine: A really engaging, if depressing, read. Elliott starts with a chapter on human guinea pigs, who lie and are lied to and whose experiences determine what drugs will be available to the general population. He covers medical ghostwriters (and the prominent physicians who allow their names to be put on papers ghostwritten for drug companies), drug sales reps, “thought leaders” who promote drugs for pharmaceutical companies, marketers reaching out to doctors and consumers, and even ethicists, who are now often on the payroll of some corporation or another. Medicine has been commercialized in so many ways that thinking of it as a profession is more distracting than useful. Elliott has no proposals to fix the problems that arise from pervasive self-interest pretending to be objective advice, making the book as worrisome as it is engaging.
Robin McKinley, Pegasus: Free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. The humans of Sylvi’s kingdom have had an alliance with the pegasi for hundreds of years, allowing them to thrive in their rich land and fend off attacks from other magical creatures. But enemies who had been thought exterminated are reappearing, including the dangerous rocs. Meanwhile, Sylvi, as a princess, is to be bound to a pegasus according to the terms of the alliance. But something unusual happens: instead of barely being able to understand one another with the aid of an interpreter, Sylvi and her pegasus can speak clearly to one another, mind to mind. This upsets the human magicians with their monopoly on translation, and Sylvi starts to suspect that something is fundamentally wrong with the alliance. The narrative dragged—Sylvi spends a lot of time angsting and thinking over the same problems again and again—and it ended on a hell of a cliffhanger (that is, something actually happened!). If you were really ready to identify with Sylvi’s specialness, which you might be, then I can imagine enjoying the intense focus on Sylvi’s interiority and her longing to be something other than human: this might be a better coming of age story for people actually closer to coming of age than I am.
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