I read Ryan Walsh’s nuanced take on the Blurred Lines decision, in which he argues that it is a dangerous precident to make musicians pay for consciously referencing another artist. Not only does this force artists into an untenable creative position (because everyone learns about music as a fan before they learn about it as a craft), but as Cory Doctorow noted in an article I liked last week, certain kinds of borrowing is considered culturally acceptible (particularly if it’s from historically marginalized communities) while other kinds requires resititution.
I read Joe Kennedy’s incisive essay on authenticity and class politics in The Baffler. I’m really fascinated by authenticity, which I’ve always thought of not as a real thing, but as a historically specific attempt to freeze something in the flow of time, and usually with material things (objects and spaces). Thus, as Kennedy notes “real” working class voters are purported to live only in rural areas while “fake” leftists come from cities. Likewise the constant evocations of coffee in his essay as a marker of a certain kind of class identity. I additionally like this essay for Kennedy’s evocations of his hometown of Darlington, U.K. I know Darlington well–it’s the next town over from the one where we lived, and was the site of some of the first political protests I saw against austerity in the UK.
I hiked up to the top of Table Rock with my son. It was a good reminder of how lucky I am to live in central New York.
looking down over West Oneonta, and the hills beyond
I read this amazing essay by Cory Doctorow, on the fundamental violence inherent of the idea of the lone genius creator who deserves exclusive (and perpetual) rights to his creation. So many great ideas in here, but I’m most impressed with the phrase “Lockean Titan”, which strikes me as an amazing core of an alternate history science fiction novel featuring English philosophers.
I read Volume 1 of Kieron Gillen’s run on Darth Vader. Believe it or not, this is the first time Darth Vader has been given a solo comic series, and it absolutely doesn’t disappoint. It somehow manages to build on the character’s mythology while expanding it dramatically, by giving Vader some adversity to overcome. Really great and recommended.
The Yager Museum held its last day of our Winter Break programming for kids, which we coordinate with other Oneonta cultural institutions. This was an event that I’ve coordinated for the last two years, and usually involves some combination of passive and structured museum activities for K-6 kids. We get a good boost in visitorship, and have a great old time. Plus, I have to say that the thing I love the most about it is hearing the sounds of children in the normally quiet and staid museum galleries.
I stumbled into the amazing world of one-page, homemade role-playing games, after reading this post on Lifehacker. I’ve played RPGs since I was a kid, and have continued as an adult, but finding time is always a problem. One-page RPGs seem to be a simultaneously economical and bonkers/simple solution.
I read Lady Killer Vol. 1 by Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones. The story is fun–a 1950’s-era suburban housewife who moonlights as an assassin. It’s a great combination of blood and sterile cleanliness. But the real draw is the breath-taking art by Joelle Jones, which draws on mid-century design, but also shows off her peerless drafting and pencilling skills.
I read this brief note from M. John Harrison’s blog, worth reproducing in full for its advice on writing good characters, as well as for a good description of what many of us are living through these days:
People who lost their ontological security so long ago they don’t even remember it happened to them. They muddle along trying to construct and maintain a self out of what’s left, continually remaking the world out of unstable bits and pieces, suffering a condition they don’t even recognise as loneliness. They stumble upon a life of habit and that will have to do. It gives them a certain gallantry. We recognise that about them even when it’s irritating. People who have lost ontological security to that extent are rarely aware of it, so when writing them it is best not to present direct explanations or origins. That would rationalise their behaviour the way single-event trauma is used in the Hollywood blueprint, to add motivation and simple causality to plot-driving characterisations and characterisation-driven plots.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which sits with best of the Western tradition of exploring the complexities of violence and national identity. Also, “The Mortal Remains” is probably the most Aickman-esque piece of filmmaking I’ve seen, combining morbid, sinister horror and comedy.
Russian Doll, which Alanna and I devoured pretty quickly. Calling a modern version of Groundhog Day does a disservice to this dark and subtle, strange, eccentric series populated with complicated, funny characters.
I continue to alternatively giggle and sigh at every new volume of Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals. Volume 4 is sad and sweet, and as usual, is asphyxiatingly funny.
I am so unhappy that the 2020 presidential season is already starting, and have actively tried to avoid thinking about it. Nevertheless, I read with great interest this piece on Cory Booker’s long commitment to defunding and privatizing public education. I’ve always felt like Booker was a fairweather friend to causes I believe in, and this well-cited essay makes clear that he’s no friend to public schools, teacher’s unions, or anything like what I believe to be enriching public education.
I watched, with ecstatic joy, the trailer for the upcoming TV series Good Omens, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The book is laugh-out-loud funny and so incredibly smart, and the TV series has, so far, done all the things I’d want to make the show honor the book. I still remember how hard I laughed when I read the passage about Aziraphale’s collection of misprinted Bibles:
And he had a complete set of the Infamous Bibles, individually named from error’s in typesetting.
These Bibles included the Unrighteous Bible, so called from a printer’s error which caused it to proclaim, in I Corinthians, “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?”; and the Wicked Bible, printed by Barker and Lucas in 1632, in which the word not was omitted from the seventh commandment:, making it “Thou shalt commit Adultery.” There were the Discharge bible, the Treacle Bible, the Standing Fishes Bible, the Charing Cross Bible and the rest. Aziraphale had them all.
the progressive movement has, in rather short order, thrust into mainstream US politics a program to address climate change that is wildly more ambitious than anything the Democratic Party was talking about even two years ago.
Ninety percent of anything is mostly garbage and that remaining 10 percent is not only excellent but worth dying for. The only way to get there is to try to be excellent with your art.
I discovered the website Fonts in Use, which provides font names for a whole host of historical magazines, books, albums, and other pieces of media. As someone whose job involves a bit of graphic design, I appreciate having a good repository of fonts for inspiration or assistance.
I have been reading Viriconium, M. John Harrison’s masterful series of novels. While reading up on Harrison, a vitally important figure in the modern speculative fiction, I ran across this long post by illustrator Jonathan Coulthart entitled “Covering Viroconium”, analyzing the (mostly failed) attempts to make decent cover art for his genre-bending, enigmatic books. Here’s the example I’ve been reading from, which is, at best, loosely representative of the contents–as Coulthart points out, it makes the novel look Steampunk (which it’s not, in any meaningful sense), and also depicts the hatching of a mechanical bird, an event that is not present in any of the text.
I put the finishing touches on the syllabus for my Hartwick College Course “Collections Management.” It’s a two-credit practicum course designed to give students the basics of Museum object handling, inventory management, and on-going collections maintenance. I tweak it a bit every year, and this year, have front-loaded more practical stuff, while leaving more abstract questions towards the end.
Now I’m back to work, and figured it was time to start weeknoting again.
This week:
I listened to Chris Hayes interview George Goehl about what it’s like to do real progressive organizing in rural America, in what is usually called Trump Country (though they both talk in interesting ways about why that’s not a fair or accurate characterization. The episode was inspiring, both for its subject matter and for Goehl’s story–he is a recovering addict who discovered a political consciousness while getting sober.
Consensus is difficult to achieve and it takes time, but without consensus spurned developers will go off and create competing standards. The lesson here may be that if we want to see a better, more open web, we have to get better at working together.
I finally finished reading all 110 stories of Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s anthology “The Weird.” My verdict is that it was absolutely fascinating and worth it for anyone with a passing interesting in the history and global scope of weird science fiction and fantasy. At 1100+ double-columned pages, it was quite a journey to get through, and I didn’t love everything in it, but I appreciated getting exposed to fantastic writers outside of the standard familiar American canon.
looking down over West Oneonta, and the hills beyond
on Harrison, 