Reading jaw-droppingly stupid stuff by people who really ought to know better is de rigeur in Blogistan, but I’ve got to note the staggering incidence of no fewer than three glaringly stupid statements from the last week or so. It’s like a Perfect Storm of Stupid. I’ve mentioned two of these already, but it’s just such an amazing thing to see such a concentration of idiocy out there, I figured I should gather them in one place.
First, there’s Mark Helprin’s idea that copyright should last forever:
Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.
That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren. To the claim that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where the heirs of Sylvia Plath berth their 200-foot yachts. And, second, why, when such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart, it is brought to bear against legions of harmless drudges who, other than a handful of literary plutocrats (manufacturers, really), are destined by the nature of things to be no more financially secure than a seal in the Central Park Zoo.
Sample response, from John Scalzi:
What would happen, almost inevitably, is that copyrights of any value (positively, negatively or ideologically) would be secured by a few large private repositories, who would jealously police any new content they believed infringed on their copyright portfolio. One suspects that most of these repositories would also be publishers themselves, who would publish on terms advantageous to them (i.e., works for hire and/or assignation of copyright to the publisher after the death of the author). If you don’t think it would happen, look at the actions of media companies today and the content protection groups they fund.
My feeling on copyright is that it should last for the life of the author, and not one second longer. Copyright expires as does the author. The sound of an author exhaling her last breath? That’s the sound of the public domain getting larger. Or at least, it would be in my world.
:: TIME Magazine’s movie critic, Richard Schickel, on blogs:
Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity….French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a name not much bruited in the blogosphere, I’ll warrant….We have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering….They need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion. ….At the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books [] blogging was presented as an attractive alternative — it doesn’t take much time, and it is a method of publicly expressing oneself (like finger-painting, I thought to myself, but never mind).
A representative rejoinder, from Lance Mannion:
Most reviewers of classical music are trained musicians, and most art critics have some training as painters. But the rest of us—and I get to include myself because, like I said, there are newspapers who’ve paid for my blather—got the job despite our credentials, or lack of them, not because of them. We were able to convince some editor desperate for copy that we could fill the space with words that would come together in a fairly intelligent fashion without getting the rag we’re writing for sued in the process.
Critics don’t have to be able to do the work they critique. They have to be able to appreciate the best of the work and be able to explain why and how what they’re writing about at the moment measures up or doesn’t measure up. In other words, they have to be a good audience and they have to be able to write well. They have to have good eyes, good ears, some experience using them, and a clear and snappy prose style, qualities that you don’t have to be taught, even if they can be taught, which is debatable. You don’t have to go to a special school, you just have to school yourself.
Exactly. Critics aren’t grown in gestation tubes until maturity, at which point they’re sprung from their nutrient-rich environments with their knowledge of film or literature or music or whatever already in place.
:: I mentioned the first two items here and here. The third, however, has gone unmentioned here, until now. Behold the stunning wisdom of Ann Althouse:
And why does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school. They will be easier reading, and with well-developed reading skills, kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home. But even if they don’t, why should any kind of a premium be placed on an interest in reading novels? It’s not tied to economic success in life and needn’t be inculcated any more than an interest in watching movies or listening to popular music. Leave kids alone to find out out what recreational activities enrich and satisfy them. Some may want to dance or play music or paint. Just because teachers tend to be the kind of people who love novels does not mean that this choice ought to be imposed on young people via compulsory education. Teach them about history, science, law, logic — something academic and substantive — and leave the fictional material for after hours.
I would quote this rejoinder, but really, it needs to be read in full. Let me just note that Althouse reveals herself in all her malignant idiocy as soon as she states that reading literature “is not tied to economic success in life”. First, the notion that education should be nothing more than glorified job training is nauseating in the extreme coming from anyone, but coming from a professor should result in immediate expulsion from ever teaching anyone again. But second, last time I checked, the entertainment industry in this country was a pretty large source of economic activity, and the act of reading fiction is a pretty big factor there, isn’t it?
You’ll all pardon me now; I need to scrub away the stupid.
