Luxbndr's Blog

The framework of American education holds fast to the ardent but mistaken belief that education is a commodity, the stuff that one pours into empty vessels.
— Read on www.laphamsquarterly.org/ways-learning/playing-fire/

very apt treatment of a controversial issue

www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/butterfly-hunting-attention.html

The Haw Lantern
The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
wanting no more from them but that they keep
the wick of self-respect from dying out,
not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

By Seamus Heaney
From “The Haw Lantern”, 1987
R

Common As Air
Lewis Hyde
FSG 2010
306 pg, 252 pg text

Building from the evolution of individual property from tribal times to our present-day discussions of the boundaries of intellectual property, Lewis Hyde presents a history of the dual nature of the individual. On one plane, each of us a new singular voice speaking, writing, creating. On another plane, each a communal spirit, drawing from heritage and culture, reflecting on and adding to a collective memory, pushing the “tribe” and humanity forward. Although the ultimate discussion of this book is the current controversy of intellectual property and corporate attitudes toward copyright, Hyde presents the current issue as arising from an historical progression. Tracing a broad take on a world of different cultures and societies, Lewis Hyde introduces a variety of approaches human beings took to the concept of “property”, and then progresses to the more ephemeral concept of individual creativity and to the split between the individual’s willingness (or unwillingness) to share such innovations and thoughts, and the communal rights or interests of the tribe.
This could be very dry reading as much of it describes the evolution of legal terms and concepts of “what is” property, but Lewis Hyde uses case descriptions and legal decisions as a motive force and keeps the narrative forward. In the same way that artists build upon the works of predecessors, Hyde shows that law and social constructs use the past as a descriptor and justifier of “the next step”, which in the case of intellectual property seems to result in longer terms of copyright and tighter strictures toward public use.
Hyde is quite honest about his perspective on this progression toward such exclusionary rights. He’s against it…. He views it as a stifling concept, which will limit the progress of the culture and create a society of the uninformed and infantile. However, he is very thorough and honest in presenting the interests of those who have created a work and why some degree of compensation is warranted. The question he does not answer (purposefully) is: where is the point between reward for the creator for the creation, and the rights of others in that culture to copy or build or deconstruct the work. What is appropriate artistic compensation and what is culturally debilitating greed? What is a genuine benefit to social intercourse and progress for humanity …and what is appropriative abuse by the “tribe”, to the detriment of the artist and in the long term, the social structure.
There are more questions posed than answers given in this very well-written book. And that is how it should be. Our culture and society (and genuinely the world’s) is at a philosophical, ethical, moral and spiritual crossroad. The answers for a society at such a place should be a collective answer, not a commandment handed down, but a demand from the collective. A demand for honest information, for shared ideas and discoveries, for progress for everyone, not just for the few. Nothing can be built if the tools and materials are locked away.

I’m not generally a reader of History…I mean, why read about dead people and dead years? Don’t we know how the story ends? A biography of Lincoln would perhaps include his assassination by John Wilkes Booth (NEWS FLASH!)

But two books of a specific era have caught me…the first Paris 1919 by Margaret Hamilton took me more than a year to read…it was written wonderfully, but the material was so fraught with implications of our own times that I would practically weep after every chapter…the arrogant divisions of territory (Iraq was created from three tribes to create a country for oil exploitation….and does that reverberate through the ages or what?)…on and on….tough reading just because of the weight it brought to this world

This latest took me less than a week…Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years is an exercise of descriptive history that really does hurtle you into a vortex of super-concentrated history, a conflation of circumstance and personality, of the beginnings of this fevered century from the perspective of Europe, 1900-1914. Connections can be made (and you will) between the circumstance of our time and the one described. It’s heavy reading but written in a whirly way that befits the chaos of the times, now and then. Highly recommended by a person that, again, really doesn’t get into history much