The Daily Shower As Nero-ish Luxury

Sometimes the most mundane of experiences can serve as a particularly acute reminder of how my life in the present differs from that lived in the past. And sometimes that experience can serve too, to put a simple daily act into global context.

For some twenty-five years now, whether in the US (1987-2000; 2002-present) or in Australia (2000-2002), I’ve performed the simple act–daily–of taking a shower. I might occasionally lose track of my location in the mental maps of the immigrant’s world but stepping under a running shower never fails to remind me that for the first twenty years of my life I lived somewhere other than my present location.

That simple act, of stepping under a pair of faucets–one marked ‘Hot’, the other ‘Cold’–which soon direct streams of water at appropriate temperatures to the shower head, jolts me out of whatever reverie I might be absorbed in and concentrates my mind wonderfully on the unimaginable luxury at hand: running hot and cold water. I have showered in dingy bathrooms, with dirty shower curtains, moldy tiles, slippery bathtubs, freezing floors, rusty taps, drafty windows, foul toilet bowls, and every other affliction you can imagine, but unless there has been a catastrophic problem with the water supply, I am guaranteed running water. Sometimes, a malfunctioning boiler has meant no hot water, sometimes, building repairs have necessitated a temporary cessation of water supplies to apartments. But, otherwise, the water flows. (And this has been true of drinking water as well: turn the taps, the water flows. In New York, it doesn’t need to be filtered, and tastes damn good.)

I don’t think I will ever cease to think of this as a luxury (even though it might have come to be a luxury I take for granted.) Bathing, not ‘showering’, in India meant: in the summers, strategically timing one’s baths for the morning so as to avoid the heated water from the overhead tanks in the afternoons; in the winters, heating up a bucket of water, using an electric heater, mixing it with cold water to get the temperature right, and then quickly, chucking mugfuls over my soaped-up body to finish the act. (Delhi winters made this business particularly miserable.) The overhead shower with running hot and cold streams still remains a rarity in Indian urban settings, though hot water in the Delhi winters seems to have become more easily available thanks to the almost-ubiquitous electric water heaters. The business of drinking water was even more onerous: potable water was only available for a few hours a day; it had to be stored and filtered before being used. I grew up getting used to the windows of time for this supply and making sure I did my bit to keep our home well stocked with drinking water. I left that all behind but it left its mark on me, one that assures I cannot be glib about my present comforts.

I’m inclined to think that this century of ours will see serious armed conflict fought for water supplies. Perhaps water will come to replace oil as the new liquid worth killing for. Thousands die every day because they cannot drink clean water. Whenever I step into my shower, or do the dishes with a running tap, and let dozens and hundreds of gallons flow, it’s hard for me to not think that I occupy a very peculiar space, that there is something Nero-ish in this daily activity of mine.

The ‘Long Live the Paper Book’ Argument Needs To Mention DRM

Justin Hollander’s defense of the traditional paper book  (‘Long Live Paper’, New York Times, 10 October 2012) is well-meant but given the severity of the challenge it faces from e-books, it is a relatively milquetoast argument. It gets to the nitty-gritty late, and as such is unlikely to convince those enamored of their convenient, pocket-stuffing e-readers. What could possibly be the downside to the idea a student could go to school with an electronic backpack that weighs–and might cost–a fraction of the traditional one? Five hundred books in that e-reader of yours, imagine that! And the price would surely fall as well. Right? (Not quite: current pricing models show the publishing industry prices e-books quite closely to physical books.)

Hollander addresses some of these claims but still only goes part of the way in critically addressing the supposed promise of e-books.  One good way to  compare a technological innovation with an older technology is in the relevant technological dimensions: in their affordances and features. For instance, a book is easily sharable; it can be thrown about a bit; you can stuff it into your pocket, you can even spill a little water on it; and so on. Or consider accessing the information contained therein. Readers know accessing a particular piece of information in a book is never too hard: page numbers, bookmarks, indices did most of the work required quickly. How easy is it to get to page 155 in an e-book? Are e-indices as easy to use? (Along these lines, one of Hollander’s best points is to note the dependency of e-books on power supplies.)

In the case of comparing the two technological objects at hand–the paper book versus the electronic book–the primary issues remain their facilitation of information sharing. Thus, access, sharing, distribution and interaction should be our primary axes of interrogation, ones that make this debate more substantive. For instance, can the publisher restrict the number of people who can read a e-book? The physical copy of the paper book can only be read by one person at a time but sharing is quite easy even if limited by copying difficulty. The advantage of a digital book is that it can be easily copied and read by more than one person. But this can be restricted. The cost of transmission to a remote reading partner in an e-book is negligible. If this aspect of the e-book is restricted, then what happens to one of its primary advantages over the dead-tree version? How about annotation? To annotate a book, you must scribble in the margins, or underline or highlight destructively. In the case of a digital book, edits and annotations can be made in the margins but their length does not have to be restricted. These annotations can be hidden so that other readers of the book are not inconvenienced. Will e-books meant for scholarship and study facilitate tools for annotation?

It seems that the gorilla in the room, as far as Hollander’s Op-Ed is concerned, is digital rights management (DRM). Consider the restrictions raised as possibilities above. They are part of the e-book future, for they are certainly part of its present: restrictions on the number of readers, on the number of times it can be opened, whether it can be written to, whether it can be printed or not. DRM offers publishers to lock up books in ways that go beyond copyright law (and it affords them the protections of the Digital Millenium Act ((DMCA)). To introduce e-books as a replacement for paper books is to also potentially introduce a form of control in a zone that does not showcase it yet.

A move to digital books is only a good one if e-books fully utilize the virtues of their digital format. If the only advantage to be drawn on is that of cost while access is ignored or only selectively drawn on, then the bargain is going to be a bad one for the most important figure in this whole picture: the ‘consumer’. Er, the reader.

Gus Fring: Breaking Bad’s Management Consultancy Guru

Yesterday, while writing on the corporate deadliness of The Wire‘s Stringer Bell, I noted in passing, some structural resemblances between that character and Breaking Bad‘s Gustavo ‘Gus’ Fring. But, in many ways, Gus goes well beyond Stringer in bringing the corporate to the corner. In particular, in his channeling indiscriminate violence into murderously well-directed and precise outbreaks of mass murder, his attention to the crystal meth manufacturing process, his deference to the men of science, his marriages of the industrial engineer, the accountant, and the factory foreman to the military general and the assassin, Gus outdoes Stringer. Gus builds his empire by an energetic, quietly confident, and slick union of corporate manufacturing schedules and assembly line management with the trade of the traditional drug dealer and thus imbues the brutal, paranoiac violence of the perennially threatened drug trade with a strategic shop-floor vision.  Stringer is merely a dealer; Gus owns the means of production, the machinery, and the workers.

Gus is modern in a very particular way: he facilitates his projects with the precision, efficiency and sterile beauty of technology, relying all the while on the powers of science and its practitioners to sustain and realize his vision.  It is never too subtle a point in Breaking Bad that some of Walter’s initial allegiance to  Gus is underwritten by his acknowledgment of the scientific and technological excellence of the manufacturing unit Gus has put together. Morally corrupt scientists in hock to those who facilitate their deadly work; think, perhaps, of German scientists in the employ of the Third Reich; science and efficiency, in the service of perversion.

Gus is thus too, a classic bureaucrat, deploying science to bring about the most desired and deadly of outcomes. He conspires, arranges, sets up the blade and makes it fall; and yet, while he is a wheeler and a dealer, he remains smooth, never greasy, mannered, never affected. Interestingly enough, Gus is entirely desexualized, and even here, his sexual austerity sets off the rigor of his management style. His attention to careful detail and his measured responses, conquer, or at least keep under control, the awesome, murderous brutality of the cartels. That management style ensures that one of Breaking Bad‘s most floral and lurid moments–the mass poisoning of the Mexican cartel–possesses a curiously contained edge. For the true genius of the mass murder of the cartel’s top leadership did not lie in Gus’ use of poison, his deceit, his willingness to expose himself to deadly risk, it lay in its logistical details, in Gus’ planning for the aftermath: the medical supplies, the doctors, the getaway mechanisms. Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. Indeed.

In Gus Fring, we were brought face to face with a business talent par excellence. When he finally meets his match and is killed, we recognize it was because for a brief, fatal moment, Gus allowed his anger to get the better of him, to let passions rule where dispassionate calculations had always held sway.

Baltimore Dispatches – III: Stringer and the Deadly Suaveness Of the Drug Trade

In New Zealand, you can get GPS-guided tours of locales used for Lord of the Rings action; tourists snap them up by the dozen. In Baltimore, the city of The Wire, you can get walking and driving tours that take you to Wire locales (like Season 2’s union-run shipping docks, for instance). It’s a pity they don’t arrange meetings with characters from the show. Many tourists would want to meet Omar, some Marlo, and its a fair bet many wouldn’t mind a chance to sit down and chill for a bit with Stringer. For one of the Wire’s most memorable characters was Stringer Bell, who–along with Breaking Bad‘s Gustavo ‘Gus’ Fring in recent times–has done a great deal to bring a deadly suaveness to our standard understandings of a drug lord’s persona. (It never hurt Stringer’s popularity that his role was inhabited by the supremely talented English actor Idris Elba.)

What made Bell especially creepy was his smooth marriage of the efficient, soft-spoken, deft, Taylorist sensibility of the product-dispenser  with the amoral viciousness of the turf-defending urban ganglord. (Fring, of course, takes that to marriage to new heights with his involvement in the manufacture of the ‘product’). Stringer aspired to a higher calling than the petty crook, and yet, his distancing from the nitty-gritty of the street level trade made him more dangerous, not less.  Stringer goes to night school; as a good student, he is attentive and takes notes; he aspires to the tricks of trade that business majors supposedly know about; he sought to bring the boardroom to the corner. But even as he did so, he became more ruthless, deadlier, ever more capable of the decision–like arranging D’Angelo’s murder–that cuts through family ties to the business heart of the deal. It was the particular genius of Stringer that in watching him, we became aware that the movement away from overt violence was a movement toward a greater danger, that his ostensible taming by the bookish knowledge he so eagerly gleaned from his textbooks and notebooks was actually the harbinger of an even deadlier organizational capacity.

Stringer’s particular dangerousness, then, lay in his manifesting and embodying the combination of single-minded business savvy with cruel disregard for human life. Unlike Fring, he never pulls off spectacular massacres but his devotion to his turf and his trade is no less acute, and we are never left in doubt that he would kill just as much as Fring does. Stringer’s deadliness lies in his movement toward a greater corporate efficiency; it is precisely that sharpened business sensibility that will make possible ever more ruthless decision-making. Part of the genius of The Wire lay in its pointing out the infection of American institutions by the war on drugs: the police, city politics, the shipping trade, the courts. In Stringer Bell, The Wire showed how the most dominant force in American life, the corporate sensibility, did its part in the drug trade and ensured that the conflict that animated it acquired its particular, dangerous edge.

Baltimore Dispatches – II: Ford vs. Chrysler, Or, Picking Your Favorite Professional Sports Team

Today’s activities in Baltimore feature as centerpiece, attendance at a backyard barbecue structured around a football game. It’s Sunday, it’s fall, football is on, the Baltimore Ravens are playing the Kansas City Chiefs. There will be beer, grilling, and frequent trips to the restroom. Sounds like the kind of thing you’d do in a sports-crazy town on the weekend, one that started on Friday night, for then, Baltimore was in the feverish grip of the Orioles-Ranger playoff to determine the American League wildcard. Tonight, sports fans in Baltimore will execute a masterful segue from devoted following of the National and American Football Conferences to Major League Baseball’s American League Divisional Championships as the Birds take on the Yankees. Baltimore versus Texas! Baltimore versus New York! Er, Baltimore versus Kansas City! The stuff of long-standing, politically significant, emotionally charged historical disputes.

Or not.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I am confronted again with the mystery of how millions of sports fans, here in the US, and all over the world, develop long-standing, passionately defended and articulated, emotionally infused, personal allegiances with large, profit-seeking, corporate entities, an enterprise that should be–but most definitely isn’t–akin to finding someone to cheer for in a Ford vs. Chrysler encounter. (Sorry, bad example; if you walk through the parking lot of a NASCAR event, you will find many who can do just that.) I succumb to the marketing pitch all too easily myself. Somehow, despite all my misgivings about the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, despite its gentrifying, traffic-causing, neighborhood-destroying tendencies, I find myself making plans to go watch the Brooklyn Nets, cheap tickets for which will run well north of $50, looking forward eagerly to Knick-humbling, thinking about a Nets shirt and cap. They are, after all, a very cool black. Dodgers-shmodgers. Brooklyn has its ‘own’ team, hooray. Bring on the rest of the world. Or at least, bring on the other boroughs.

Disliking some teams is easy too: I reflexively loathe the Cleveland Indians for their mascot and the Washington Redskins for their name; I dislike the Boston Red Sox because, well, they’re the Red Sox. In the world of professional soccer, I take refuge in easy formulas like disliking English soccer clubs, thus transferring prejudices acquired in the world of cricket to a new domain. It seems all too easy. The Edgar Allan Poe theme of yesterday’s post reminds me that last year, when I asked my sister-in-law if she had adopted Baltimore’s football team as her own, her answer was, ‘Well, of course, how could you not cheer for the only team in the NFL to be named after a literary character?’ Which in turn reminds me an old rejoinder of mine when asked about my NFL allegiances: ‘Both New York teams, the Green Bay Packers, and no one from the NFC East.’ Why the Green Bay Packers? Well, how could anyone not like the NFL’s only non-profit team?

As this little collection of irrationally acquired prejudices shows, there isn’t much sense to it, and there couldn’t really be when easy tribalism is such a prominent motivation. The true wonder of it is how it builds and soars to the heights of quasi-religious fervor, expressed loudly in those gigantic, fueled-by-tax-breaks temples, sports stadiums, which dot the land whose dictator would be called coach.

Baltimore Dispatches: The Cask of Amontillado and the Terrors of Immurement

This Columbus Day weekend, I am ensconced in Baltimore, which has meant that, among other things, my thoughts turned to Edgar Allan Poe, the city’s most distinguished literary son, one of a select group of writers whose work I was first exposed to via comic books, and someone who, to put it mildly, gave me the shakes for a very long time. The story that did the most to ensure this clammy place in my heart was the Cask of Amontillado.

One hot Delhi afternoon, as I rode back in a crowded school bus from a fairly typical sixth or seventh grade day, I noticed, next to me, a boy reading a comic book with a lurid cover that spoke of stories of the terrifying, the macabre, the gloomy. I was bold enough to ask to read it when my companion was done, and was soon plunged into its grim world. The first story I read was the tale of Montresor’s deadly revenge. I was horrified by the ending, as Montresor immured Fortunato within the catacombs that lay beyond the wine cellar under his palazzo. I read other stories in the collection, but none of them, including the Murders in the Rue Morgue, had the same effect on me.

The story of Montresor and Fortunato tapped into a childhood claustrophobia, a paralyzing fear of being locked in, of being crushed alive by an invisible weight that drove the air out from my lungs. A recurrent childhood nightmare of mine had been that of somehow suffocating under a blanket. It was one reason I found the winter months especially scary:  sleeping then meant the use of the classic North Indian razai, the heavy, stuffed-with-cotton-wool quilt that made the Delhi winter nights tolerable. Time and again, I would wake at night, shaking, gasping for air, convinced I had been buried by my razai. The razais seemed cavernous, with acres of space beneath them that shrank to enclose me in a woolly grave. I was never able to put my head under one and regarded my brother, who nonchalantly went to sleep with his head shoved under his quilt, with some amazement.

This fear was compounded by the presence of the immurement theme in Indian legend and history. More than one Bollywood movie featured characters walled up alive while plaintive dirges played in the background. One particularly famous instance occurs in the 1960 epic Mughal-e-Azam, which shows the Mughal Crown Prince Salim’s illicit lover Anarkali, immured on the order of Salim’s father, the Emperor Akbar. And immurement didn’t just happen in the movies. The tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, suffered the loss of his two sons to this terrible fate: the nine year old Sahibzada Fateh Singh and the seven year old Sahibzada Zorawar Singh were so condemned on 12 December 1705, by the Governor of Sirhind, Wazir Khan. (The two boys had been captured following battles between Sikh and Mughal forces in the Punjab, and ‘asked’ to convert to Islam, a ‘request’ they had refused). It wasn’t just in the realm of fantasy that immurement lurked.

But there was something else about the Cask of Amontillado that made it more than a story about about a man left to die, walled in and alone. It featured treachery and deception, it spoke of unhinged anger, moved to reach out and exact the most terrible retribution of all. And if I had a fear of being crushed, suffocated, and buried, I felt even more terrified by the thought that such a fate would be facilitated and eventuated by an ostensible friend’s deception. Fortunato’s shrieks haunted me for years; for the love of God indeed.

‘But Already It Was Impossible To Say Which Was Which’

It is almost accepted wisdom among political punditry that in recent times, American political and cultural life is characterized by two revolutions: the Fiscal Rectitude one and the Cultural License one. The former was won by the Republican party: it is committed to austere deficit reduction and budget balancing by attenuating social programs and tax cuts to ‘wealth makers’ as an essential component of trickle-down economics. (These serve as vital prongs of polemical and rhetorical attacks on big government and serve to provide the Tea Party much of its bombastic ballast.) The latter was won by the Democrats: it is committed to gay marriage, feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism (among other things; please insert your own favored Godless activity here).

This is an exceedingly crude picture–and certain to appear to be a caricature to supposed ideologues on both sides of the political and cultural spectrum–but it works as a rough heuristic. It is especially crude when one considers that most Americans benefit from Big Bad Scary Government and would like some form of it to continue to loom large in their lives, and conversely when, for example, women and African-Americans still do not find themselves adequately represented in either economic or political leadership, and when gays, outside of urban concentrations, still need to keep their heads low. But, like I said, it’s a rough picture.

It is an apparent consequence of these two ‘revolutions’ that in the Battle of Who Can Display More Fiscal Rectitude Democrats have steadily moved rightwards in an effort to minimize their electoral losses, thus slowly coming to occupy much of the so-called center, which, much like the magnetic pole, appears to be a shifting locale; thus, the current American political center is certainly rightward of many of its earlier positionings. This current location of the ‘center’ and the Democrats’ move towards it perhaps explains why in the first presidential debate Barack Obama found himself in so much agreement with his opponent.

For instance, on Social Security:

You know, I suspect that on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It’s going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker — Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill.

Barack Obama also found himself in so much agreement with his opponent, because besides being a matter of substantive policy, like the free-market-and insurance company-friendly healthcare plan called Obamacare, he is a compromiser first and foremost, even when in possession of a strong political hand. Psychological analysis of this need to be approved of by his opponents is already a favored pastime among many who gnashing their teeth over his invertebrate tendencies. It is unsurprising then too, that Obama found himself unable to summon up much passion when it comes to debating policy details. Wow could anyone generate heat and light in the midst of broad agreement? By quibbling over details? Hardly the stuff of fire and brimstone debates.

I do not doubt audiences for the second and third debates will see a different Obama, one prepared to be more contentious. His handlers will have apprised him of the disastrous feedback from ‘focus groups’, I’m sure. But those prepared to look beyond the huffing and puffing, will, I’m afraid, resemble nothing so much as the creatures clustered around Mr. Jones’ Manor farmhouse, looking in, desperately trying to find a distinction with a difference.

Note: Many will find my characterization of Obama and the Democrats unfair: surely, they are better on the environment, on their commitment to healthcare, and so on? But the devil lurks in the details, and it is in the bare particulars of actual legislation that we find broad agreement among those who inhabit Capitol Hill.

Debates: Good for Drinking Games

In 2008, during that year’s interminable election season, bars in my neighborhood posted signs they were showing the Democratic primary debates, the presidential debates, the vice-presidential debates; we all seemed to be comfortable and enthusiastic about the notion of election debates as spectator sport. I made plans to watch the vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden in company; I got together with a friend, we drank wine and bourbon, and laughed uproariously at that bizarre pair; I keenly watched too, the presidential debates between Barack Obama and John McCain. Eight years of a Bush administration were coming to a close, and I allowed myself to believe that, yes, change was in the air, that deliverance from that grinning fool and all he represented was possible. On election night, I hosted a results party. Friends came over, we checked laptops and television screens, whooped and hollered, groaned and moaned, drank champagne, nibbled nervously, and finally, when the Obama-election was announced, I opened my window and yelled out into the darkness: ‘Fuck you Sarah Palin!’

Nothing like that will happen this year.  Last night, as the first presidential debate kicked off, I finished dinner, sliced up an apple or two and sat down to watch the penultimate episode of Friday Night Lights. Later, I checked the news–the Yankees had clinched the American League East–and my Twitter timeline and noticed much chatter about the lameness of it all: the lying Etch-a-Sketch Mitt Romney, the dull Barack Obama, the ineffective Jim Lehrer. I posted a couple of facetious Tweets, read the opening chapters of Sanford Levinson‘s Our Undemocratic Constitution, and went to bed. I doubt the basic pattern of dinner, Netflix watching and bedtime reading will change on the nights of any of the debates to follow. In the case of vice-presidential debates, to quote an old friend, I would sooner slit my wrists with a butter knife than voluntarily watch Paul Ryan on television for even a second.

Part of the adverse reaction to the debates, as my remarks above indicate, is based on some weariness. But mostly, it seems unclear to me they offer voters anything useful in a political dimension. As my friend and ex-student Tara Mulqueen succinctly noted:

[I]ts very premise and construction of politics effects a massive closure on anything that might be deemed properly political.

To wit, it seems implausible that the format and staging of the modern debate offers anything remotely close to what might be termed a political dispute; the moment this political ‘encounter’ is placed on television, we lose any semblance of political struggle and descend into posturing built up out of the bare-faced presentation of talking points, the avoidance of analysis and argument, the evasion of difficulty. It’s almost as if some public spectacle were required to serve as the summum bonum expression of the vapidity of the election season i.e., the skirting and skimming of the most difficult problems that face the nation, and the debate does so, no pun intended, spectacularly. And puzzlingly enough, it isn’t even clear whom the spectacle is intended for: if undecided voters are undecided because they aren’t paying attention, then what is the point of watching?

The debates remain a spectator sport; fuel for Twitter-and-Facebook-chatter and drinking games; I paid up in 2008, but now I’m done.

Birthdays, Coincidences, and Divination

I was born on the 156th anniversary of Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s expulsion–on grounds of atheism–from Oxford. (Thomas Jefferson Hogg, his collaborator on The Necessity of Atheism, was expelled with him; the two were accused of ‘contumacy in refusing certain answers put to them’ by the master and fellows of University College.) My birthday is also, remarkably enough: the 189th anniversary of Beethoven‘s first public concert; the 140th anniversary of his death;  the 96th anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune (though there seems to be some disagreement about the exact date); and the 43rd anniversary of the premiere of George Bernard Shaw‘s ‘Saint Joan‘ in London. Among other things.

A very distinguished list, I’m sure you will agree. Unfortunately, closer examination of the ‘among other things’ reveals my birthday to also be: the 41st anniversary of the first lip-reading tournament in the US and the 30th anniversary of the day spinach growers in Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue of Popeye. The chuckles that these events might provoke are quickly silenced by noting that my birthday is the 25th anniversary of the arrival of seven hundred Jews from Lvov in Poland at the Belzec concentration camp, and the departure of the first ‘Eichmann transport’ to Auschwitz.

My birth date, through history, appears to have played host to, in equal measure, the sublime, the sordid, the ridiculous, and the horrifying. There seems to a similar pattern in my birth anniversaries: my 4th birthday was marked by the Bangladeshi declaration of independence (which kicked off a genocidal crackdown by the West Pakistani Army on the Bengali populace) and the ascendance of the ‘Benny Hill Show‘ to the top rank in television ratings in the United Kingdom; my 12th by the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat; and so on. You get the picture: there really isn’t one. My birth date and my birthday is like all the other days of the year, undistinguished and memorable in its own particular way.

An inquiry into, and examination of, the coincidental occurrence of events in world history on the date of one’s birth is an old fascination of ours; it remains a species of divination, an inspection of cosmic tea-leaves, a close reading of the universe’s entrails that tempts and afflicts many of us, sometimes, I suspect, even the hard-headed ones. Could something, possibly, just possibly, connect us to this strange list of events? Could there perhaps be a historical pattern that I am part of? Am I the bodily manifestation of some global world-historical-process? It can engender grandiose idiocy too: Have I inherited some of the intellectual talents of Shelley, Beethoven, Shaw? These are lovely, deluded, tempting thoughts, strategies to grant of possible meaning to a life that otherwise may appear destined for insignificance. The relationship with astrology is, of course, unmistakable; that is precisely what that popular pseudo-science set out to do, to convince us that there was some deeper meaning to the date of our birth, over and above the circumstances leading to the coupling of our parents.

Still, some virtue may be found in such pursuits: if nothing else, it may provoke further reading on a matter that catches our eye, and also remind us that the calendar stretches out long into the past before us, and will continue to do so into the future, long after we are capable of noting the coincidence of our birth anniversaries with events of historical interest.

Copyright Protection for Academic Works: A Bad Idea, But Who’ll Bell The Cat?

Richard Posner has written yet another interesting critique of patent and copyright law; it includes a remark of particular interest to me:

At the other extreme is academic books and articles (apart from textbooks), which are produced as a byproduct of academic research that the author must conduct in order to preserve his professional reputation and that would continue to be produced even if not copyrightable at all. It is doubtful that there is any social benefit to the copyrighting of academic work other than textbooks, which require a lot of work and generally do not enhance the author’s academic reputation and may undermine it.

Posner is exactly right. When it comes to academic works like research monographs and journal articles copyright law is a severe handicap for the creator(s). Restrictions on copying, distribution, and the making of derivative works all work against the author(s) because every one of these restrictions ensures that the most valuable outcome to be derived from an academic work is inhibited: readership is limited as is the central ‘income’ forthcoming from a reputation economy. In most academic works, copyright passes to the publisher; as every aspiring academic comes to realize quickly, one of the essential steps in getting an article or a book published is the signing of the copyright release (or transfer) form; the ‘work’ is no longer yours; step back and observe another entity control access to material that only benefits you if access to is unrestricted and indeed, positively facilitated.

Unfortunately, reform in this domain appears unlikely because the academic world is run by the terrible trio of Promotion & Tenure Committees, ‘Prestigious’ Academic Presses & Journals, and Pompous Seniors Who Refuse To Take the Lead. And animated by the Matthew Principle.  Till P&T committees start to recognize work published in non-traditional venues, and concomitantly, the ‘prestige’ associated with traditional academic presses and journal publishing groups comes to be associated with them, not much will change in the current situation. Much good would be done if senior academics, those with tenured full professorships at  Famous Universities[tm] start publishing their work in non-traditional venues like open access journals and new presses committed to open access books. They have plenty of wealth to spare in this reputation economy; junior academics would benefit a great deal from their largesse in this domain. Their hoarding and accumulation does little to change matters, and ensures the perpetuation of an archaic and ultimately counterproductive model of academic publishing. .

Note: While Posner is not critical about copyright protection for textbooks, some textbooks in my field, philosophy, are anthologies of material available in the public domain, with little value added by the editors (perhaps some discussion questions). These are then marketed at exorbitant prices. I remain hopeful that as more public domain philosophy is digitized and placed online, these textbooks will be phased out in the near future.  And of course, more importantly, many anthologies bear the price they do because they include copyrighted material for which fees have to be paid: excerpts from journal articles or books, which should never have been copyrighted in the first place.