This weekend's front-page literary news (at least for anybody in New Jersey) is the brouhaha over Snooki out-earning Toni Morrison at Rutgers events. Snooki earned $32,000 for two student-produced comedy Q&As, whereas Morrison will receive $30,000 for delivering the commencement address to Rutgers students in May.
From what I've ascertained, Snooki's biggest asset is her lush mane, which Toni Morrison's tongue could effectively trim/shred/hack apart in no-point-two seconds. But the priorities seem to be a bit skewed. The commencement address will hit over ten thousand students and offer them a chance to hear an iconic figure speak. Snooki, a "reality TV" (and don't get me started on that genre), hasn't made the intellectual and cultural contributions that a figure of Morrison's stature has.
A Star-Ledger editorial critiques Rutgers's decision to offer Morrison the $30,000 speaker's fee, yet...strangely, it doesn't even call Snooki into question. The editorial attacks the decision simply on a financial matter, and sure--maybe it's gratuitous. But it's a rare step from a New Jersey establishment that's been slicing funding left and right. Instead of axing connections between the arts and society, bringing Toni Morrison to Rutgers as a commencement speaker presents a dedication to literature and the arts that we need in economically trying times.
Now, $32,000 to Snooki...that might be a little too fat.
(By the by, Toni Morrison will be reading at Rutgers-Newark on April 26th.)
Showing posts with label Law and Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Law and Literature. Show all posts
Monday, April 4, 2011
Friday, December 10, 2010
Weird Pennsylvania: Law Enforcement We Cannot Take Seriously
Some places have real news stories--I'm thinking, of course, of the riots storming the UK right now over the hike in tuition, which led to Prince Charles and Camilla's car being attacked. But Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania law enforcement cannot distinguish fact from fiction.
I have a number of personal encounters with the...flakes of local law enforcement in Pennsylvania, which I won't elaborate on here. But needless to say, I feel enthralled by any story that picks up on these themes.
About a week ago, a fire ignited in the George Washington Hotel in Washington, Penna. (a city near Pittsburgh). Emergency response teams arrived at the scene to address the fire, and in so doing discovered a blood- and gore-soaked room. Police Chief J. R. Blyth, according to The Daily Mail article linked to above, described the room as "the most grisly murder scene in his 35 years of law enforcement."
Until they discovered that it was actually a movie set from two years ago for a slasher flick starring the late 1980s heartthrob Corey Haim.
There are some things (hikes in tuition rates, drastic cuts in education funding) that are well worth spazzing about. But what led the police to assume that this was, in fact, a murder scene? Didn't they enquire into when the room had last been registered to an occupant? They spent eight hours before realizing that the blood splattered about the room was fake.
Here, we have an instance where reality becomes the fiction, and fiction, the reality. The first rule of detection--as with literary criticism--is to question your surroundings and what you see. We cannot jump to the obvious conclusions; blood does not always equal murder, just as our discoveries in the first pages of a text may prove false by the time we finish reading a book.
The entire episode is utterly surreal, but I think it's an instructive moment. Appearances can be deceiving. And...apparently, somebody is stilling preserving a shrine to the latter day work of Corey Haim.
I have a number of personal encounters with the...flakes of local law enforcement in Pennsylvania, which I won't elaborate on here. But needless to say, I feel enthralled by any story that picks up on these themes.
About a week ago, a fire ignited in the George Washington Hotel in Washington, Penna. (a city near Pittsburgh). Emergency response teams arrived at the scene to address the fire, and in so doing discovered a blood- and gore-soaked room. Police Chief J. R. Blyth, according to The Daily Mail article linked to above, described the room as "the most grisly murder scene in his 35 years of law enforcement."
Until they discovered that it was actually a movie set from two years ago for a slasher flick starring the late 1980s heartthrob Corey Haim.
There are some things (hikes in tuition rates, drastic cuts in education funding) that are well worth spazzing about. But what led the police to assume that this was, in fact, a murder scene? Didn't they enquire into when the room had last been registered to an occupant? They spent eight hours before realizing that the blood splattered about the room was fake.
Here, we have an instance where reality becomes the fiction, and fiction, the reality. The first rule of detection--as with literary criticism--is to question your surroundings and what you see. We cannot jump to the obvious conclusions; blood does not always equal murder, just as our discoveries in the first pages of a text may prove false by the time we finish reading a book.
The entire episode is utterly surreal, but I think it's an instructive moment. Appearances can be deceiving. And...apparently, somebody is stilling preserving a shrine to the latter day work of Corey Haim.
Friday, February 19, 2010
The Power (and Controversy) of the Almighty Google
Google has come under--simultaneously--a great deal of scrutiny and a great deal of praise. When Stephan Pastis recently lampooned Google in his comic strip Pearls before Swine, the fear that his characters, the Crocodiles, exhibited is not unlike the fear surrounding the issue of Google’s book search. In Pastis’s strip, the Crocs feared the power of “ ‘Da Google’ ” to turn up any answer, any solution.
I’ll admit to being a product of my generation--Google searches are fun and easy. And the number of times I’ve used Google books to find what anthology contains which story by a particular author have been numerous. So it’s a great research tool, and as such is a boon to readers and writers alike.
However, there’s also the issue of intellectual property. Minor little thing, right? In New York, federal judge Dennis Chin has been hearing from both sides of the deal surrounding Google’s book search. The problem: Google scans the entire book if it’s out of print, but “out of print” does not immediately equate with “out of copyright.”
By way of example, James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners--published in 1914--is out of copyright in the United States and therefore in the public domain. However, many editions of the book continue to be published, precisely because of how popular it is. And if the book was published in the United States after 1922, odds are that it’s still under copyright, even if copies haven’t been printed for decades.
Proponents say that the deal with Google will allow publishers and authors to earn money from digitized copies of books that have been long out of print--in theory, a good thing, as it will allow people to access these long-lost works again. However, opponents charge that it’s still copyright infringement. They have a pretty solid argument, too: Basically, you can’t punish somebody for infringing copyrighted works by reproducing them without the copyright holder’s assent, and the proposed deal does little more than punish Google (for copyright infringement) by making it profitable for them to infringe copyright.
Huh?
Yes, it is that confusing, and Judge Chin has commented, according to The New York Times, that he won’t rule immediately because there’s “just too much to digest.” (And of course, I find it a little funny that he says “digest,” because a digest can also be a consolidation of books and texts, and what are we dealing with on the Google books imbroglio if not this question of access to books?)
Read the article at The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/technology/19google.html?ref=books
I’ll admit to being a product of my generation--Google searches are fun and easy. And the number of times I’ve used Google books to find what anthology contains which story by a particular author have been numerous. So it’s a great research tool, and as such is a boon to readers and writers alike.
However, there’s also the issue of intellectual property. Minor little thing, right? In New York, federal judge Dennis Chin has been hearing from both sides of the deal surrounding Google’s book search. The problem: Google scans the entire book if it’s out of print, but “out of print” does not immediately equate with “out of copyright.”
By way of example, James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners--published in 1914--is out of copyright in the United States and therefore in the public domain. However, many editions of the book continue to be published, precisely because of how popular it is. And if the book was published in the United States after 1922, odds are that it’s still under copyright, even if copies haven’t been printed for decades.
Proponents say that the deal with Google will allow publishers and authors to earn money from digitized copies of books that have been long out of print--in theory, a good thing, as it will allow people to access these long-lost works again. However, opponents charge that it’s still copyright infringement. They have a pretty solid argument, too: Basically, you can’t punish somebody for infringing copyrighted works by reproducing them without the copyright holder’s assent, and the proposed deal does little more than punish Google (for copyright infringement) by making it profitable for them to infringe copyright.
Huh?
Yes, it is that confusing, and Judge Chin has commented, according to The New York Times, that he won’t rule immediately because there’s “just too much to digest.” (And of course, I find it a little funny that he says “digest,” because a digest can also be a consolidation of books and texts, and what are we dealing with on the Google books imbroglio if not this question of access to books?)
Read the article at The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/technology/19google.html?ref=books
Monday, December 7, 2009
Identity Crisis
On 1 December, the trial of John Demjanjuk began in Germany. If it doesn’t sound familiar, it should--but I wouldn’t be surprised if this sounds like news, because most American news agencies that I frequently look at (NYTimes, LATimes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CNN) have been relegating this to their international news pages, a few clicks away from plain sight. This is why I have the BBC as one of my start-up pages on Firefox; I can actually learn what the news is, as opposed to learning that yeah, we still don’t have an exit strategy for Afghanistan. That’s nothing new.
But then again, neither are trials for John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk has spent the better part of the last three decades embroiled in legal controversy. He first immigrated to the United States and obtained citizenship in 1952, at which point he got married and started the American dream life--work in a car factory in Cleveland, Ohio; have kids; et cetera. In 1977, he was first charged with war crimes, for being “Ivan the Terrible,” a notorious concentration camp guard responsible for the deaths of more than 27,000 Jews. The United States revoked his citizenship in 1981 and extradited him to Israel five years later, where he was charged and convicted for the murders--a ruling that Israel’s Supreme Court overturned for lack of evidence explicitly connecting Demjanjuk to “Ivan the Terrible.”
In 2002, however, problems arose again, with Demjanjuk once again losing his American citizenship when an American judge ruled that there was information linking Demjanjuk to “Ivan the Terrible,” most specifically a wartime ID that American prosecutors have used to place him as a guard at the Nazi death camps. Now, after being extradited and without any citizenship, 89-year-old John Demjanjuk is standing trial for the murders of nearly 30,000 people.
The greatest question amidst all of this is: Who is John Demjanjuk? Murderer? American laborer? Father? Husband? Racist prig? It’s a question that Philip Roth explored in his 1993 PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel Operation Shylock. In the novel, Roth--who has his own identity issues, as he’s being stalked and has had his identity stolen by another man whose name appears to be “Philip Roth” (the sort of blatant narcissism/self-ego-boosting typical when Roth makes himself a character in his books)--watches the trial of Demjanjuk in Israel during a chapter entitled “Forgery, Paranoia, Disinformation, Lies.” He listens to an English translation of the proceedings through a headset. Lots of mirroring ensues--Roth mulls over the legal history of the Demjanjuk proceedings, of his own doppelganger (the reason for his stay in Israel in the first place), and also the position of John Demjanjuk, Jr. watching Demjanjuk, Sr. being tried.
Roth writes, “Admittedly, the story of my double was difficult to accept at face value. The story of anyone’s double would be” before later commenting “Not everybody is crazy. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous--this is not to be crazy.” In this line of questioning, Roth wants us to consider two things: Who is Philip Roth? (Another version of this first question—Who am I?) And who is John Demjanjuk? What terrifies Roth in Operation Shylock is precisely this sense of doubling--that maybe out there, somewhere, there’s an identical stranger (who may or may not be me) for whom I’ll have to take the fall.
Read more about the Demjanjuk trial at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8388334.stm
Roth, Philip. Operation Shylock. Paperback. Vintage-Random House. 398 pp., $14.00.
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