Late bloomers, Holmes' copyright shame, Guinness Magi, Unphilosophical living, Scott revival?, Context Collapse.

The irregular review of reviews, vol. XV

Second Act summary

A very good set of notes summarising Second Act in one page.

Another lens I’ll remember is “making yourself a big target for luck”. The book introduced me to Austin’s types of luck:

• Luck from motion — when you get an opportunity because you’re out in the world doing interesting things

• Luck from awareness — when you notice an opportunity is available to you (or you’re open to it)

• Luck from uniqueness — opportunities that come to you because of your unique interests, passions, and projects

Scott Sumner late bloomer

This is an excellent answer from Scott Sumner about why he was a late bloomer. He got a (very) brief mention in Second Act and I was interested to see this.

I can’t analyze exactly why I was a late bloomer, but it was clearly an aspect of my personality. It wasn’t like I was held back by something artificial. I just wasn’t applying myself as aggressively or forcefully as I could have, but when I would get under the gun, I would at the last minute somehow get things done that I need.

I almost didn’t even stay at Bentley. Then I did my dissertation very quickly right before they were going to fire me. I went in ABD. Then, a few years later, I actually got turned down for tenure for lack of publications. Then quickly got a few publications, including the JPE article I mentioned. I got tenure by reapplying under different circumstances.

I was treated actually very well; many schools, I wouldn’t have even survived at. Then, unlike a lot of faculty, I did most of my research after getting tenure, almost none before. I had a very odd career that didn’t fit the normal mold. I didn’t pursue topics that were trendy. I just pursued things I was interested in. Even my dissertation — Lucas was my chair at Chicago, and I did currency hoarding. That’s an odd thing for someone to do studying under Lucas, who’s known for rational expectations theory and so on. I just pursued what interested me.

Sherlock Holmes and the immorality of copyright

Disgraceful behaviour from the Sherlock Holmes estate, reported in the Atlantic, which continued to try and exploit people making Sherlock-inspired films, books, and anthologies, after they lost a copyright case in the courts.

In 2015, the estate filed suit against the makers of Mr. Holmes, an Ian McKellen film adapted from a novel by Mitch Cullin, who complained to a reporter, “It is cheaper for corporations to settle than go to court, and I believe the estate is not only keenly aware of that reality, but that they bank on it as an outcome.” Five years later, it went after the Netflix movie Enola Holmes, contending that the estate owned the stories that defined the version of Holmes “stamped in the public mind.” Both suits were likely privately settled, but with all rights now expired, the estate has turned to what its head of licensing, Tim Hubbard, described in an email as “authenticat[ing] projects and partnerships where our collaborators want to be connected to the source.” (The estate declined to address specific questions about its legal strategies or arguments.)

This is legal bullying. Shame! Shame! Conan Doyle would have been appalled!

The bigger point here is that there is no good legal or moral reason why authors’ work should remain in copyright for decades after their death. It does the public no good, and it gives authors’ children and grandchildren control over work which they ought not to exercise.

Examples of “good” estates (such as the Waugh estate) don’t invalidate this argument. There are always incentives to promote an author’s work. Undoubtedly Waugh would be treated as a serious author without the good efforts of his grandson.

Copyright is also bad for free speech. It is thanks to copyright that publishers are able to adjust the wording of old books. They have control of the text, so you are obliged to buy their version. Once the book is in public domain, the original can always be obtained. But why should Roald Dahl’s grandchildren tell me what to read?

If the language is sufficiently offensive, it will be corrected anyway. (Indeed, many authors have been previously changed like this, including Agatha Christie.) This is why classic authors aren’t treated the way Fleming is. No-one controls the text once it is out of copyright.

What copyright does enable is the extraction of unearned income out of readers and writers fifty, sixty, seventy years after an author’s death. It is immoral. All the Holmes estate has done is to expose just how perverse the incentives can be.

Let us be civilised and reduce the limits to something sensible like five or ten years. Creative work lives on when it becomes part of the culture, when it can be absorbed, reformed, sampled, remixed—copyright is entombing older works, preserving them in aspic. And many of them end up as museum samples in the bottom of the drawer.

Liberate Sherlock Holmes! Free Poirot! Down with copyright! Decentralise literature!

Journey of the Magi

Is Alec Guinness the perfect reader of T.S. Eliot? They sound eerily similar… This is a little late for Epiphany, but always worth listening to.

James Marriott wrote about Journey of the Magi recently.

I have to say that I find the religious symbolism ever so slightly hokey and self-important. The newly converted Anglo Catholic Eliot is enjoying his new membership of a special club with its own important codes and symbols rather too much. You get to congratulate yourself on noticing that “three trees on the low sky” is a reference to the crucifixion and that the “old white horse” galloping away in the meadow is Jesus (a reference to the book of Revelation, I think). Then you can go on and spot that the vine leaves over the tavern are a symbol of Christ (the true vine), the empty wine skins are a reference to the Gospel of Matthew (“Neither do men put new wine into old wineskins”). These too-specific symbols always seem disappointingly brittle and one-dimensional to me, lacking the mystery and ambiguity of the symbolism of The Waste Land. Still, it’s an amazing poem. You can read it online here.

It’s the Four Quartets I go back to, rather than The Waste Land, a poem that is both monumentally important, if not quite of the order of Wordsworth and Milton, but also overrated.

When the cultural dust has settled and vanished, and the mono-ideological acolytes of modernism and its inheritors are no longer quite so dominant in the literary establishment, we might come to see The Waste Land as a mighty accomplishment that is also smaller, narrower, and less grand than the other great innovative poets (Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth). There is an argument to be made that although a lot of new poetry was written in the wake of Eliot—from Auden to Hughes—his legacy was ultimately stale.

Where is the inheritance now? What future English poetry?

The epic passed out of poetry into other genres in the nineteenth century and Eliot might be better thought of as the end of a tradition rather than the reinvigorating of one. The break that Eliot made with the past is, after all, much less significant than that of Wordsworth.

He was haunted by Dante for good reason. We treat him, sometimes, as if he were a Dante, bringing new life to an old tradition, as Dante did with Virgil; but what if the shade of Dante haunts him more perceptively as being a poet not of the founding of a tradition, but the burying of one? Eliot is haunted by many poets’ ghosts in Four Quartets. None are named directly. But they are haunting, it seems, the whole possibility of the future of English verse.

I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: "What! are you here?"
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.

Eliot often writes about the dead patrol. “The end is where we start from.” I sometimes wonder, is Eliot the end where English poetry will start from, or was he merely the beginning of the end? There will always be poetry, but will there always be poetry of the tradition that spanned Dante to Eliot? In the wrong mood, this is the way I read the final lines of Journey of the Magi.

…were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The speaker is a convert, hopeful now of the eternal life, but trapped, too, in a civilisation and a culture that cannot see that they are the old dispensation. They do not know anything has changed. We are all too worried that everything has changed. But should that make us more or less optimistic for the future of literature?

I don’t think I quite believe any of this, but in some moods I do take it seriously…

The torture of the unphilosophical life

I read The Man Without Qualities for the first time when I was in graduate school in Classics, and within a year, I had left that programme and switched to philosophy. Why, given that I had been devouring philosophical texts since high school, didn’t I major in it in college, or pursue it after college? I don’t think I could have put it this way at the time, but: I was afraid. The fear was partly an insecurity about myself — that I wouldn’t measure up, that I had nothing to contribute, that I was not worthy to walk the esteemed corridors of philosophy — but the other part, the deeper part, was a fear about philosophy. I was afraid that if I looked carefully, I would discover that there really were no answers out there. As long as I never tried to find the right way to live, I couldn’t definitively say it didn’t exist. I’m not claiming that Musil reassured me that it did. No, what The Man Without Qualities gave me was a vivid and terrifying glimpse of the life of thoughtful observations; Musil was my ghost of Christmas future. I would have to, somehow, find in myself the resources to believe that inquiry was possible, both for human beings in general, and for me in particular, because, as scary as the prospect of failure was, I had just seen something scarier.

Agnes Callard has a new book coming out which I have been enjoying.

Walter Scott revival?

Scott does not try for Austen’s more naturalistic approach to characterization in this novel; there is little obvious concern with psychology or personal development, although the titular pedant, a mere crank much of the time, is ever so subtly, even organically, softened during the course of the story. But if with Austen there can be an air of ennui in the depiction of the idle classes’ world, in which nothing is more important than who marries whom, Scott creates here a tapestry with a sense of depth. Virginia Woolf, in rare twentieth-century praise for Scott, spoke of his Shakespearean ability to make his characters reveal themselves in speech, and there is indeed a grandeur and directness in much of his dialogue.

I read a few Scott novels last year and loved them. Ivanhoe is just superb. I wallowed. I marvelled. I admired. Read it. Read it now.

Context

Perhaps more so in his preface than the poem, Ruby emphasises the notion of poetry as a ‘media technology’, a means of ‘disseminating and storing information’. New media technologies lead to the development of ‘new social and economic forms’ to manage them. These changes alter the ‘relationship between the generators of information and their recipients.’ Hence Ruby’s claim that ‘the technologically and economically mediated relationship between poet and audience’ — what he calls ‘context’ — is the ‘major determinant of poetic form’. However, Ruby’s conception of poetry as means of ‘disseminating and storing information’ seems perverse if not straightforwardly wrong. Writing transforms the metaphysics of information; the page (and in our age, hard drives or flash memory) becomes the medium that stores and disseminates the information. Before writing, the poem encodes the information because it is the form of the poem that allows it to be stored, i.e. remembered. But once writing is invented the form of the poem becomes incidental to its storage; it is writing itself, the parchment and the written word on the parchment, that stores the information. The poem qua poem is only relevant to the encoding of the information insofar as it is ironic and the form is used to suggest that the encoded information is false. The notion of poetry as a media technology becomes irrelevant to its history as soon as poetry is no longer an aide memoire. Milton’s choice of ‘English Heroic Verse’ had nothing to do with storing information, it was for ‘ancient liberty recover'd’. Perverse because there is so much more to poetry than storing and disseminating information. Sure, Shakespeare’s sonnets encode information but then so does graffiti.

No-one has been quite as harsh on Ryan Ruby’s new “poem” as I was, but nor do I see people coming out with unqualified praise and eager enthusiasm. And as this review makes clear, the argument is in fact rather weak.