Lloyd
Shepherd
wonders in
the
Literary Review whether pirating
books on the Internet is as bad as people like me and my colleagues at
Copyright Licensing NZ
make out. Quote unquote:
Markets such as Russia remain a problem for
publishing. By some estimates, 95 per cent of e-book downloads in Russia are illegitimate.
But the big players in e-books – specifically Amazon – do not operate in Russia
and there is a paucity of legitimate titles available (perhaps only 60,000). […]
In such an environment, piracy becomes the convenient option, not the outlaw
one.
All of
which raises an interesting question: if your book isn't being distributed in
Russia but is being merrily downloaded there, how should you feel? Before the
internet, such piracy (in physical formats) would have been invisible to you.
Now you know about it, what should you do? Should you even be (secretly, of
course) pleased?Neil
Gaiman, whose titles seem to make up a large proportion of all the books on
Library Genesis, has said that piracy in Russia has, in fact, increased his
sales there. In this light, there is only one thing worse than being pirated
and that is not being pirated, at least in those countries where you’re not
receiving much distribution anyway. […]And that itchier question remains: if you find a
copy of your book on a service such as Library Genesis, what do you do? Do you
hit the ‘takedown’ button in Muso and get it removed? Or do you ask yourself
whether it’s better to be read illegitimately than not to be read
at all? It is, at the very least, a question worth asking.
There
is a new edition of James Joyce’s
Ulysses.
I have two already – what’s weird about that? – so am afraid I don’t
have room for this one, and not just because the entire novel has been hand-written
by
Charlene Matthews onto
38 seven-foot tall, two-inch diameter poles. Quote
unquote:
Each pole has sixteen ‘cels’ comprised of four
pages, a total of sixty-four pages per pole. The first cel has the first
line in it and then Matthews measured down 9" and wrote that line in the
next cel and so on, with the last cel containing the last line on the
pole.
You
know it makes sense.
A.D.
Miller (
here is
my diary of a weekend with him) in the
Economist
on Nowheresville. Quote unquote:
Trowell
service station, slap in the middle of England on the M1 motorway, is not a
place many people would associate with intrigue or passion. For most people
motorway services are scarcely places at all, but blurred nowheres on the way
to somewhere else. Spend 24 hours here, however, and this bland yet strange
locale—a sort of amenity that almost everybody visits but hardly anybody
notices—emerges as a microcosm of modern Britain’s complexion and pathologies.
A day here reveals Trowell’s special rhythms and ecosystem, its microdramas and
eccentricities, murmured sadnesses and hopes.
Economist
Matt Nolan on
empty
calories and fake food. Spoiler alert:
In
this case I purchased the Tim Tams and had a few with a coffee.
Matt
Nolan again on
that Avatar deal that
sees three sequels to a film I hope never to see being made here in New
Zealand. Quote unquote:
We may say “the government is doing it, because people feel good
having a movie shot here – it makes us proud!” Yeah sure, that is
relevant – so we need to think about it.
Ok, so who are the people who get all this “pride” from the movies?
Generally, middle class New Zealanders. Who is paying, generally
wealthier New Zealanders (as they pay most of the tax). What spending is
likely to be sacrificed in order to pay for subsides, poor New Zealanders.
Directors law,
once again. If you don’t agree with how I’m conceptualising it, then why
don’t we get government to get private New Zealander’s to pay into a fund based
on the “pride” they get? You may complain that people will “free-ride”,
but then I would quickly point out that merely imposing a preference for
“pride” on everyone in order to get them to pay
for something you want is problematic!
It is
inconsistent, nah hypocritical, to support this type of protectionism and then
complain about inequality and poverty in New Zealand. And yet, that is
what I see a bunch of people doing as they see it as “sexy” – and also because
they don’t actually know what the terms “poverty” and “inequality” mean.
If only more people thought clear, transparent public policy based
on the positive economics that allows it was sexy instead …
A
graphic
tribute to Peter O’Toole from JAKe in the
Guardian.
Finally,
a book.
Distant Intimacy: a friendship in
the age of the internet, by Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein (Yale
University Press, 2013), in which two Jewish men of a certain age who have
never met, one English, one American, email each other to kvetch about life,
the literary world, politics, stuff like that. Wonderfully funny, often
suddenly poignant – they have grief to spare – and either of them is quotable
on any page. Here is Raphael being rude about Malcolm Gladwell,
discussed
here recently):
I
call publications such as Outliers skipping-rope
books: they’re meant to give you a little gentle mental exercise, or the
illusion of having had a mental work-out, but raise no kind of a sweat.You
think you’re learning something because that kind of text almost always has
diagrams to make it look academic. The marketing persons always bulk them up
fatter than they need to be, rendering their prosthetic prose as void of
meaning or flavour as those jelly-fishy mammary inserts which raise a girl’s
alimony prospects along with men’s amorous propensities (Dr Johnson again, re
Garrick’s chorenes, I think).
And
here, later, is Epstein to Raphael, being rude about Saul Bellow:
At
the centre of Bellow’s fraudulence is his creating in his fictions figures
clearly intended to be he who are inevitably sensitive, kindly, sweet, not to
say great souled, whereas in so-called real life Bellow was touchy, unkind
nasty, and black-hearted: a prick, in other words, and a particularly
malevolent one. Bellow and my dear friend Edward Shilswere once close friends,
but had several fallings out. When Edward lay on his deathbed, Bellow asked if
he might come over to make things up. Edward told me that he didn’t want him to
come over, that he had no wish to make things easy for “that son of a bitch”.
After Edward died, Belllow put a character clearly meant to be Eward in his
last novel, Ravelstein, claiming that
he smelled (which Edward never did) and that he was homosexual (whch he most
distinctly wasn’t). Ah, me, why is it always raining in the Republic of
Letters?
Good question. So
here is Rick Danko in 1989 singing Buddy Hollo’s “Raining in My Heart” with
Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band (Levon Helm, Joe Walsh, Dr John, Billy
Preston, Clarence Clemons etc):
