The Breaking Time

Textbook racket attacks fair use

If you quote it, we'll shoot you

A good column by Quinn Norton highlights a fresh outrage:

In their ongoing quest to punch every puppy they can find, rights holders have turned to suing those most rapacious of pirates, professors. Academic publishers are asking a judge in Georgia for an injunction against Georgia State University for a liberal fair-use policy. What these publishers are objecting to is unapproved and unpaid-for book and article excerpts in class materials—essentially quoting and anthologizing. They want everything that can be paid for to be paid for. Specifically, professors couldn't use more than 10 percent or 1,000 words of an in-print book, whichever is less. That's about two pages. And it's campus wide—if I use two pages of Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes in my class, no student or teacher can use a third page without paying or getting sued by the publisher of Moral Mazes.

---

But that's not what fair use is about. It's a limit to copyright baked into the law. In the act itself, it cites a teacher making copies of classroom materials as a fair use. It's part of the copyright bargain; we grant these rights in exchange for material that improves our society as a whole, not so a group of publishers can get a piece of that mad college student money.

Absurd doesn't even begin to cover it.

Look, it's not like college textbook publishers don't have an extortion racket going on already. Hell, there's even recent legislation trying belatedly to curb the worse excesses.

I was somewhat fortunate: ASU was one of the few universities with a book rental system. While helpful, that didn't stop professors from assigning lots and lots of additional books, preferably expensive new editions. Barely having money for food, buying these was out of the question. I managed to pass my classes by borrowing, copying pages, taking copious notes, having a good memory and spending A LOT of time in the library. I was far from the only student in this situation, and I'll never forget the day when, after complaining about the price, a professor told a number of us to "just ask your parents for more money." Fewer things crystallized more clearly the assumption that education is the domain of the wealthy. This is one more move to worsening that divide.

Turns out xkcd was accurately predicting a terrifying dystopia

There's also a risk here I think rights holders still don't grasp. Ideally, when crafting a law, you want something that satisfies both competing interests: publishers get money, the public gets information. The point of this is while neither party gets completely what they want, they get enough that most people obey the law most of the time.

The increasing tilt towards rights holders is reaching such a ludicrous extreme that eventually people just cease obeying the law, consequences be damned. Determined students and professors will just make the copies anyway. What, are the publishers going to find all of them, much less sue?

The result is the equivalent of legal civil war: the occasional brutally sued defendant, but far more people who simply ignore the law. That this sort of scorched earth tactic never works never seems to stop companies from using it.

Want to help spur a dark age? Close a library

My hometown library, thankfully not shuttered yet.

I woke up this morning to this heartbreaking post by Charles Simic:

All across the United States, large and small cities are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operations. Detroit, I read a few days ago, may close all of its branches and Denver half of its own: decisions that will undoubtedly put hundreds of its employees out of work. When you count the families all over this country who don’t have computers or can’t afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak.

---

I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal library is often the only place where books in large number on every imaginable subject can be found, where both grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace, free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them outside.

I've written here before about the decay of public infrastructure for some similar reasons, though it focused on nuts and bolts like roads and street lamps. Libraries are just as vital a piece of infrastructure.

This one hits home for me. The main family heirloom, passed down by my great-grandfather, is a set of 1912 Harvard classics. My mother, a schoolteacher, found ways to make sure that what ever else went on in our lives, whatever lack of money we were struggling with, there were always books around. Frequently, that was possible because of a public library.

For the short-sighted, it's an easy target. Books, after all, will still exist and, besides, goes the dismissal, there's the internet.

Yeah, no shit. Undoubtedly even the occasional Victorian street urchin had some access to books and outside knowledge, but that misses the damn point.

Libraries' greatest service isn't for the well-off, who can get education and information relatively easily in any era. Instead, its crowning achievement is opening up knowledge to those large parts of society — the unfashionable neighborhoods, the rural swaths — that the tastemakers and futurists usually ignore.

Ignored doesn't mean nonexistent, of course, and for those populations, libraries are a major resource. One, that unlike a lot of other services, doesn't lecture. We're open, read what you want. 

It is the best kind of egalitarianism: available to everyone, relatively cheap, and rewarding initiative. Libraries don't require the upfront cash or monthly bills that internet access does, and are open to non-tech savvy parts of the population. Often, they include local collections or obscure texts that the internet has, for the large part, ignored. Hell, they even open access to that same new media to those who can't afford it.

As if all that wasn't enough, libraries complement the education systems in place, because even if those are magically reformed, tomorrow, there's inevitably things their curriculums will leave out.

Even at points in my childhood when public education was lacking, access to a library took up some of the slack. Thanks to them, I first learned about dueling political theories, Alexander the Great, Chinese history and evolution, to name just a few.

If you think I'm drawing too much from my personal past, consider that there are millions out there who owe the same debt.

The presence of a library, even in the smallest community, is a reminder that the world is more than what's right in front of you, and that ideas aren't just the province of the rich.

History, from one view, can mark catastrophes by the destruction of libraries. For the power-hungry and zealous, the rooms full of books were a threat, or expendable.

Today, we don't need invaders. Just a smug belief in our own advancement, and a blind refusal to pay the bill.

Five reasons history matters for tomorrow

Ever and always, like it or not

Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time knows that I'm a history addict in the worst kind of ways. In fact, along with politics, it's one of my main interests.

That's also a bit of disclaimer for what I'm about to say. Because it seems that history all too often gets short shrift from would-be futurists. That's a shame because, like politics, one doesn't have to be an addict to see that some level of engagement is necessary.

What follows are five simple reasons that history, in all its varieties, is a key to grasping the world around us, and how it may unfold tomorrow.

An appreciation of complexity 

So the nascent feminists are fighting for the Cherokee, the Cherokee have black slaves, the black slaves are joining the Seminoles to fight Jackson in Florida, the black freemen are fighting with Jackson against the English. — Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing on the antebellum era

One cannot honestly study history without gaining a greater understanding of how truly complex the world is, as Coates' quote above demonstrates. 

Reading multiple histories gives one an appreciation of the interwoven yet conflicting stories, motives and cultures that have driven humanity since the opposable thumb. That understanding, carried over from the page into our current world, cannot help but make us better able to grasp what goes on around us. It also brings us to another advantage...

History is the enemy of dogma

“Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.” — Jacques Barzun 

Better understanding how human events played out before — in all their complexity — tends to make it harder to believe a single, dogmatic version of events. Notably, one of the first acts of tyrants is to scrub and rewrite entire swaths of history and exile those who contradict the official line.

This doesn't mean that cynicism necessarily overwhelms idealism. Coates' point in the quote above, for example, isn't that feminism or the rights of minorities were less important because some of their proponents engaged in (to us) seemingly contradicting actions but rather that those contradictions must be understood because it dispels convenient illusions about the past. Knowing that minority Americans, for example, fought on different sides of different conflicts, for different reasons leads to viewing another part of humanity as well, human, instead of a monolithic "they."

History, at its best, argues and disagrees with itself but does not rest in turning over new stories and forgotten facts.

History is the enemy of stainless causes, perfect leaders and unquestionable creeds; a vaccine against the dangerously, hatefully simplified.

This is important because...

Santayana was right

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." — George Santayana

Overquoted, perhaps, but completely, totally right. History reveals trends in societies and human behavior. It allows us to use these to assess events in our own time, to better 

Observing, for example, Government 2.0, it is important to know about previous upper and upper-middle class reformist movements — like the early Progressives or the Best and Brightest — that have sought to bring "modern efficiency" — especially technology — to government and how those pushes succeeded or failed. 

For those of us seeking to make tomorrow just a little better than today, this is absolutely essential. Forewarned can be forearmed, if we let it. Knowing history allows us to see what's evolving around us with new eyes and judge accordingly.

Speaking of new eyes...

The original augmented reality

History is reading all that you can as fast as you can and - remembering as much as you can. — Lynn Berleffi Darr

Yes, while people are salivating over the possibility of shades that can tell them any number of snazzy things about their surroundings, some books and conversations can already provide a similar level of understanding.

See that road there? That used to be black neighborhoods until they were deemed "blighted" and demolished in the "urban renewal" of the 1970s. Knowing history provides that context, allows us to see not just the world around us, but how it came to be, and why.

It doesn't just extend to our physical surroundings either. Listening to someone speak, history allows humans to pick apart the memes, the enduring themes in their words and background, it reveals the story behind the story. 

It does all of this without the need for any machinery more complicated than memory, and little possibility of being run over by a truck. History puts us in a place, physical and mental, and broadens our view beyond simply "I am a thing of flesh, going about my life."

That's important because it begets something else...

Today is not the only world

"History teaches everything, including the future." — Lamartine

But many would like to think that it is. It is the conceit of every society, even with a shred of historical knowledge, that its spot is destined, fixed and that no one or nothing has been here before.

Looking at history, we can see the ruins of old prejudices (and defeated dreams too, for that matter), we can see that there is nothing inevitable about today. We can remember invincible armies destroyed overnight and small ideas that prove surprisingly tenacious.

History is there to tell us, in no uncertain terms, that things can change, that the world around us can become far better — or much worse. Finally, it reminds that, either way, it is us — the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race — that makes it so.

Triumph of the book

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

-Carl Sagan

I'm an unrepentant book addict. I have more of the lovely things than places to put them, and I'm always finding and getting more. Being a book lover, however, I'm familiar with the widely held belief, held by both print enthusiasts and others, that my favorite method of transmitting knowledge is kind of a dying breed. I don't believe it personally*, but it's out there.

Recently, as a friend and I discussed the return of Futurama and various series each of us should check out ("You really need to see The Sopranos, a fascinating character study"), it occurred to me that not only are books not dying, their method has infected other media. Television, one of the primary media that was supposed to replace books as better suited to the needs of a smaller attention span starved public is now more like its old-fashioned rival than ever.

Television has increasingly embraced longer plotlines, deeper characterization, more literary themes and definite, planned endings than ever before. The best, most-talked-about shows (like The Wire) are compared to novels. Series are perceived as more permanent things, not to be forgotten about after they're cancelled, but worth watching and savoring (sometimes, as with Futurama and Family Guy, this even leads to an eventual resurrection). Meanwhile, the sitcom is being slowly garroted in the closet.

Hell, there's even a booming industry in going back and overhauling old school TV stalwarts (Battlestar Galactica, V) to make them more like literature and less like, well, old school television.

The changes haven't just affected the elements of television programming, but how it's received as well. It's less common to see people gather around for a particular episode, unless they're particularly avid or the episode a landmark of some sort. Instead people seek out series, either online or on DVD, and watch them, often several episodes at a pop. Like chapters of a damn book.

Nor is television alone, over the last decade and a half, comic books have scrambled, with varying degrees of success, to embrace literary methods. Writers have received increasing prominence while people read whole story arcs in a sitting more frequently than before and older work is sought in collected editions instead of individual issues. The very name of the medium's even considered slightly disreputable. No, no, these are now graphic novels (the term dates back to the '70s, but it's become much more common in recent years).

There's a lot of factors behind these changes, of course, but one reason for television and comics increasingly mirroring books in format and consumption is that literature is a really old medium, and so there's been far more time to find some common ways to hold people's interest, methods that continue to have staying power. As they come of age, television and comic producers seem to be learning that crafted surprises, interesting plots, realized characters and immersive worlds never go out of style as long as the human brain continues to function. Perhaps, even, audiences don't mind some bleakness and ambiguity. 

Something Sagan nailed about books is their endurance. Perhaps those dark, magical little lines will have the last laugh, after all.

* Exhibit A in reasons books ain't dead is the fact that one of the most massive media phenomenons in memory was the Harry Potter series, something that should dispel any notions that coming generations aren't willing to read long, complicated things on old-fashioned dead tree sheets, as long as they find them interesting.

Poems for Friday: Clamor

Marines in Afghanistan. Photographer unknown.

The following poem, written by Elyse Fenton while her husband was stationed as a medic in Baghdad, seems about perfect for today. Or tomorrow.

Staking fencing along the border of the spring 


garden I want suddenly to say something about


this word that means sound and soundlessness


at once.  The deafening metal of my hammer strikes


wood, a tuning fork tuning my ears to a register


I’m too deaf to understand.  Across the yard

each petal dithers from the far pear one white 


cheek at a time like one blade of snow into


the next until the yard looks like the sound


of a television screen tuned last night to late-


night static. White as a page or a field where 


I often go to find the promise of evidence of you

or your unit’s safe return. But instead of foot-


prints in the frosted static there’s only late-


turned-early news and the newest image of a war 


that can’t be finished or won. And because last


night I turned away from the television’s promise


of you I’m still away.  I’ve staked myself

deep to the unrung ground, hammer humming


in my hand, the screen’s aborted stop-time still 


turning over in my head: a white twist of rag 


pinned in the bloody center of a civilian’s chest, 


a sign we know just enough to know it means 


surrender, there in the place a falling petal’s heart would be.

The Rundown: It's the goddamn Breaking Time!

And Frank Miller is insane...

Frank Miller goes absolutely insane, with Batman, parts 1, 2 and 3: After coming off a news-writing binge that ended at approximately 7 a.m. I'm in the mood for some goddamn humor, and this hit just the right chord.

For those of you that don't know, Frank Miller, famed in earlier years for his classic, gritty remakes of Batman, has undertaken one final swan song, All-Star Batman and Robin, that personifies what he's become known for in his later works: utter stark, raving madness. This is well demonstrated by the panel above, which is actually fairly mild compared to the rest of the series.

Seriously, it's hard to appreciate the actual, sheer depth of the batshit (har har) until you actually see it for yourself. The I-Mockery version above is the perfect place to start, and as well as being fucking h

On a more thematic note, Miller is in the unique position of both helping to birth an artistic trend (grimdark superhero remakes) and play a major role in its final descent into clueless self-parody.

From Avatar to Fern Guilly in Five Easy Steps Also known as "White guy rebels against evil organization who wants valuable resource, joins indigenous tribe, hooks up with native hottie when someone's about to die. Hero bonds with important creature, wins over tribe, has a hippie moment and ends with (usually a repeated hippie bullshit line." This covers a surprising amount of stories, many making millions upon millions of dollars. I'll leave you to speculate why.

Legitimizing the illegitimate The excellent blog The Polis looks at ways of "legalizing" the slums that are a horrific, but often vital part of expanding urban centers around the globe. Essential Breaking Time reading.

Robots get sensitive skin An important technological step, though it further confirms my dire suspicion that technological progress will grind to a halt once researchers can fuck their robots.

The Story of Dune Fifty years ago Frank Herbert, a middle-aged journalist, sat down to write what would become one of the most innovative and influential sci-fi novels of all time. A surprisingly satisfying LA Times piece.

SEC charges Goldman Sachs with fraud And times just got real interesting. 

Blog Concerts The excellent Robin LeBlanc has dreamt an idea whose time has come, and a way to turn those writing binges into pure, transcendental art. Read it. These need to become a reality, soon.

All Tomorrows: Sovereign Bleak

I should have posted this earlier this week, when it went up, but the political season's heating up in Asheville and my job has kept me quite busy. This is happy news though. After a long, work-induced hiatus, I've returned to the Coilhouse blog with a piece close to my heart, on how the vision of a dark tomorrow became the norm, and some of the writers who made that happen.

A main reason this topic's particularly important to me is because I give sci-fi a little more credit than most, and not just because I happen to really like it. The idea of not just a few writers, but an entire genre striving to write about what happens next is a radically new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things. Isolated and wonky as sci-fi can often be, its very existence impacts the kinds of futures we envision and strive for (or fight against). It often functions as the proverbial pebble in our collective mental pond.

So, without further ado, read the whole thing:

I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

---

Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. The pilot finds a stowaway; a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother.

The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.

But space captains are heroic sorts. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. This time will be different. Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training; surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace.

No. There is no solution. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.”

The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity.

Godwin’s classic was only the beginning. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world.

This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future.

"Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated"

Exhibit A...

The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina has, in finest There is No They fashion, delivered a tour de force article, "How to Write About Africa," in Granta savaging the common stereotypes behind much ostensibly sympathetic coverage of the continent:

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

He gets even harsher. More, below the fold.

Poems for Friday: Sailing to Byzantium

St. Patrick's/Revile the Saxon Day was this week, and that always gets me thinking about W.B. Yeats. Also, something about the timeless, end-of-an-era feel of this superb poem always enchants me:

THAT is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

- Those dying generations - at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Poems for Friday: Jabberwocky

The great beast, illustrated by John Tenniel

I cannot believe I haven't posted this before, but that's the reality of it. Lewis Carroll knew how to have some glorious fun with these strange and beautiful things we call words.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves


Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;


All mimsy were the borogoves,


And the mome raths outgrabe.



"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!


The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!


Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun


The frumious Bandersnatch!"



He took his vorpal sword in hand:


Long time the manxome foe he sought—


So rested he by the Tumtum tree,


And stood awhile in thought.



And as in uffish thought he stood,


The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,


Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,


And burbled as it came!



One, two! One, two! and through and through


The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!


He left it dead, and with its head


He went galumphing back.



"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?


Come to my arms, my beamish boy!


O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"


He chortled in his joy.

'

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves


Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;


All mimsy were the borogoves,


And the mome raths outgrabe.

And as awesome as all that is, it's been a particularly hard day, so let's add some muppets.