books

Simon Reynolds has a nice obit for science fiction writer Harry Harrison, who died a few days ago.
Harrison's Make Room, Make Room became the kitsch stinker classic Soylent Green but the novel is a superior treatment of the overpopulated world theme. As Reynolds notes, in the book "soylent is not 'made of people,' it's made of soya and lentils. That and krill and seaweed crackers make up the diet for 99 percent of the population."

As a child I read Deathworld and a few other Harrison books and I am one of the few people on Earth who read The Man from P.I.G. (1968), the author's 1960s spy spoof. As Jared Shurin summarizes it:

The book - a slightly extended version of a novella - is quick and slightly dirty. It follows a simple problem/solution format, with every problem solved by the judicious application of pig. Harrison is clever enough - and funny enough - to keep this going, but were The Man from P.I.G. any longer, it would cease to be amusing.

The overall plot, the mystery, its inevitable resolution and even the characters - they're all actually fairly meaningless, with twists and turns introduced at random by Harrison. The book is an extended joke about how pigs can solve any problem. A funny joke (fortunately) but not a particularly deep one.

Hey now - this book is called The Man from P.I.G. - it has to be good (I remember enjoying it).

Have been reading "the internet" on H.P. Lovecraft copyrights. As in, who owns them?

Wikipedia embraces the argument of Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi that the works are mostly in the public domain. Yet copyright claimants exist and approvals must be sought.

The best articles are Dan Harms' and Chris Karr's. An essay by Dwayne H. Olson (aka D.H. Olson) in the Donald Wandrei anthology Don't Dream (Fedogan & Bremer, 1997) covers issues similar to Karr's -- both actually looked at the court documents in Wandrei's papers in the Minnesota Historical Society.

Joshi makes no mention, Olson notes, of the court records in the long-running probate suit over Lovecraft rights, where ownership issues were exhaustively at issue. Olson summarizes the court's findings of five categories of Lovecraft material and degrees of ownership between August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, founders of Arkham House and the two people most responsible for Lovecraft having any literary legacy whatsoever. After their Lovecraft anthology was rejected by major publishers in the late 30s, they started their own company and eventually, over several decades, built the Lovecraft brand, as we would now say.

The probate court expressly didn't decide copyright issues, only the nature of Wandrei's and Derleth's joint ownership of Lovecraft properties after Derleth's death in 1971. Yet the court papers give a vigorous summation of what these literary properties were, including various iffy questions about conveyances of rights. To my mind these questions weren't nailed down back in the day because no one involved, including various Lovecraft distant heirs, thought the property had any value. The heirs and executor were more than happy to grant Wandrei and Derleth whatever rights they needed to develop these speculative properties: "Go, knock yourselves out, and best of luck" seems to have been the attitude.

After 12 years of litigation in which Derleth's lawyer and executor tooled Wandrei around in court (the lawyer was subsequently fired by Derleth's daughter for his scheming), a settlement was reached giving Wandrei 53% and the Derleth estate 47% of the Lovecraft properties, according to Olson. S.T. Joshi would have us believe that these are percentage ownerships of nothing but the trick is proving it. If Arkham House, its partners and their heirs say they have "chain of title" on copyrights, who is going to court to establish otherwise? Likewise it's very unclear what relation the "big" publishers (Del Rey and Penguin) have to the copyrighted material. Do they pay a stipend to the Derleth and Wandrei heirs and assigns for all the books they sell? (Stephen King wonders something similar in the 2004 foreword to Michel Houellebecq's Lovecraft book, although he neglects to mention Wandrei.)

Dan Harms concludes, and I think I agree with this:

This accounts for why exactly the HPL copyright question is unlikely to be resolved for some time to come. It’s not in the best interests of any of these publishers [Del Rey, Penguin, Arkham House] to raise the issue, because they’ll make pretty much the same amount of money either way. It’s not in the best interests of the rights owners to go to court, because they can only lose. Nobody else really has the money or time to go through with it, and the benefits of such a lawsuit are likely to accrue to people who didn’t actually file it. Adding to this the current trend of extending copyright terms again and again, we’ll not likely see HPL be free and clear in the public domain for some time to come.

Animated GIFs: The E-Book

This idea died after a little investigation into what's possible with e-books. To begin with, you have several commercial e-book formats, either based on PDFs or something similar. These are imaged pages, as opposed to dynamically generated ones that could pull up other media and incorporate it into text.

The open-source "EPUB" file in theory works like a browser and could assemble pages with animations. No one is actually doing that because of (i) the variety of hardware devices EPUBs would be loaded on (ii) general unreliability.

It's a shame because it would be nice to have some books on the subject of internet-based expression that weren't dependent on verbal descriptions of unseen processes. Unlike web-based publications, books force you to stay within their confines and confront the points they're making, rather than letting you wander off into the link wilderness.

Art on Facebook, 2007-2012, by Frankfurt Sorbonne

When established New York art critics such as a Jerry Saltz and Howard Halle opened Facebook accounts, what culture critic Frankfurt Sorbonne calls a "discursive shift" took place. Criticism up to that time had been print-based, edited, and advertiser-influenced. Suddenly a level of art writing opened up that more closely resembled "art talk" -- fleeting spoken conversations, larded with gossip and politics and treated as "back channel" even though they could be read and saved by privileged readers of these writers. Unlike phone conversations and face to face talks, text and screenshot records were being kept of these "convos."

Gradually after 2007 most of the art world, up to that point shy of cyberspace and blogging, moved onto Facebook and began "sharing." Art conversations proliferated, from critic-to-critic, critic-to-artist, critic-to-public and every imaginable combination of those linkages. Sorbonne contends that this shadow world of "chatter," given Facebook's size and influence, constitutes an alternative discourse as influential as the old media structures' but for one thing -- a lack of formalized, centralized, prioritized record-keeping.

This book, then, based on Facebook conversations, chats, pics, posts, and comment threads compiled and solicited by Sorbonne and his students, gives us the first glimpse of a "new, digitally-mediated art world." Examples are given where particular artists' works are vetted critically and economically, where a consensus on artists or movements develops over time, and where various opinion leaders fell in and out with each other via tools such as "unfriending." Many of the conversations occurred within Facebook's ever-shifting onion-skin layers of access, so there is a quality of frankness to this writing one does not find in say, print media monthlies.

[Publisher's note: this book has been held from publication pending legal action by various persons and entities.]