danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

Things right now are going very badly for me.  Here is a short list, in no particular order:

• I have no working toilet in my house.
• I have several exams and papers due this week.
• My poor wife has been injured or sick for several weeks and I am powerless to make her feel any better.
• My email seems to work only around 50% of the time.
• Cox Cable switched from the national PBS high-definition feed to the local one, and now I don’t get the same programs; other programs I like show at different times; the signal looks much worse; and I will now have to endure the frequent pledge drives, which the national feed doesn’t carry.
• I still haven’t got my motorized bicycle running.
• I changed guitar strings a few weeks ago, and now my Telecaster won’t stay in tune with itself.
• My guitar makes an annoying buzzing sound because the outlet my amplifier is plugged into isn’t grounded.
• I cannot stop eating Girl Scout Cookies and I feel guilty.
• I have a million chores to do around the house and very little time to do them.
• I have to read hundreds of pages for school, and I am not up to the task.
• I am very tired, and it’s only nine o’clock in the morning.
• When I am at school, I cannot concentrate on what my professors are saying, because I am thinking about one or more of the above.

Filed under: Health, House, Rantings, School on February 25th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

First, Dick Cheney is human garbage.  He just told Jim Lehrer that he doesn’t believe that the public disapproves of his actions and performance as vice president.  When reminded of his historically low approval ratings, he said something to the effect that that’s not what he’s hearing from people.  No kidding!  Imagine that: Dick Cheney–the man who disappears from the public eye for long stretches; gives few interviews, especially to legitimate news organizations; spends a considerable amount of time in a bunker–doesn’t realize that an enormous majority of Americans think he bears considerable personal responsibility for much of the United States’ present difficulties.  Cheney, lest we forget, has been wrong about almost every single thing that has happened in the past eight years.  He would probably still tell you that there are weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraq really was in the last throes of the insurgency in 2005.

Second, what is wrong with this Timothy Geithner guy?  If you’re just some regular dude, I can understand being confused about what has and hasn’t been withheld from your paycheck.  But this guy is supposed to be running the Treasury Department?  I think an awareness of your personal tax liability should be among the minimum qualifications to hold that job.  Meanwhile, it seems the common denominator amongst all rich and powerful wankers is undocumented household employees.  Two tips:

1. If you’re rich enough to hire household help, you’re rich enough to hire a U.S. citizen.  Don’t be so cheap.
2. President-elect Obama should drop this guy.  There’re better people out there.

Filed under: Politics, Rantings on January 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

With less than a week to go before his tenure as president concludes, George W. Bush is busy giving interviews.  These naturally involve questions about his administration’s actions and policies.  The answers he is giving to these questions–questions often pertaining to mistakes made during his presidency–are  frustrating to hear.  He claimed in a press conference that he doesn’t believe that America’s image abroad has been damaged by his policies.  Really!?  I guess I can understand that attitude if I consider how carefully he’s been insulated from protest.  It isn’t like people angry with his administration are given opportunities to introduce themselves to him and complain in person.  He’s probably seen many middle fingers raised in his direction while passing by spectators in a limousine, and had a shoe hurled his way now and then.  But he is kidding himself if he thinks America is as respected abroad as it was before he chose to invade Iraq, and authorize torture of human beings and hold them without due process.  His insistence that his administration “doesn’t torture” is now known to be a lie.

I guess it doesn’t matter any more what President Bush thinks or does.  Since the beginning of 2008 it seems that the public has written him off, and has been eagerly awaiting the day when he leaves the White House and our lives.  The next president will have a lot of work to do, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I suppose, to exert a great deal of energy holding the bad actors of the Bush Administration accountable.  How criminal Bush has been himself is unclear.  Contrary to his frequent pronouncements that his “job is to protect the American people”, the president swears an oath only to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”.  In that light, many of Bush’s activities can be seen to be a violation of that oath.  It would feel good to see John Yoo, David Addington, Paul Wolfowitz and others in prison, but the damage is already done.

It’s one thing to make poor decisions or promote flawed policies.  Imagine, for example, that Bush had had his way in 2005, and his Social Security privatization program had been authorized.  Millions of Americans would be worse off today.  That would have been bad policy, but at least it would have gone through the proper channels and had a fair hearing.  It is another thing entirely, in my opinion, to have behind-the-scenes  wheeling and dealing with mid-level Justice Department lawyers to authorize warrant-less wiretapping, or instruct the CIA to kidnap civilians off the streets and fly them blindfolded to secret prisons in foreign countries to be tortured.  That all once seemed very John Clancy, but we now know it to have happened while Bush was president.  His shoulder-shrugging notwithstanding, a lot of people have been harmed by his policies.  With less than a week to go, it all just seems so sad.

Filed under: Politics, Rantings on January 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

As a student of literature, I buy a goodly number of books.  For the sake of convenience, I acquire many at Goerings Bookstore on 1st Avenue, just a block north of campus.  All the English professors put their orders in there, and the store is generally well-stocked.  Plus, they have titles that the big stores in town (Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Books-a-Million) might not generally carry.  Actually, you’d be surprised at the important novels that I haven’t been able to find at some of the chain stores – Oliver Twist, for instance.  Next time you’re in one of these stores, see what Dickens novels they have.  If they don’t have a copy of Bleak House that’s a bad sign.  That said, authors like Aphra Behn or Mary Elizabeth Braddon are considerably less well-known, and I can understand how difficult it would be to stock every work of classic literary fiction and still have room for the mandatory coffee shop in the front corner.

For this reason, it’s convenient that Amazon.com exists.  If I have the time to wait, and I can put together an order substantial enough to qualify for free shipping, it’s hard to beat Amazon.  I value having a brick-and-mortar store like Goerings, and I want them to succeed.  For all I know, they’re doing very well, since they get so much student business.  But in several respects no brick-and-mortar store, including Goerings, can compete with Amazon.

First, Amazon charges below cover price for most of their paperback books.  Sometimes this is a substantial discount.  For example, the Penguin edition of Clarissa bears a cover price of $24.95, and that is what you’d pay anywhere else, including Borders (I saw a copy at a Borders in Chapel Hill, North Carolina last August).  At Amazon, however, you can get a brand new copy of Richardson’s absurdly long novel for $16.47.  That’s a substantial discount.

Second, of course, is selection, which I mentioned above.  At a good independent brick-and-mortar shop, you will certainly find a copy of Wuthering Heights.  (If you don’t, turn around a walk out; they don’t deserve your business.)  Often, however, they may only have a mass-market edition, like Signet, which is inexpensive, but bare-bones.  The Penguin and Oxford editions are better, and just a few dollars more.  Best of all, though, especially for something like Wuthering Heights, is the Norton Critical Edition, which has translations of Joseph’s incomprehensible mumblings.  You can find all of these at Amazon.

Finally, Amazon has built an astonishing used marketplace.  For paperback classics it is often no cheaper after shipping to buy used than new, but for almost everything else it is.  But the easy availability of used books (and CDs and DVDs, too) is apparently a mixed blessing.  David Streitfeld wrote an especially interesting article last weekend about his conflicted feelings regarding buying and selling used books online.  On one hand, it’s such a convenient and cost-effective way for readers to shop.  On the other hand, it hurts publishers, bookstores and authors.  This doesn’t apply to Samuel Richardson or Charles Dickens, of course, but it does affect living writers (and songwriters and filmmakers), and the shops that sell their wares.  Streitfeld’s article cites a California shop owner who criticized him for “depriving” the author of income, and driving bookshops out of business.

I have a problem with that sort of logic.  We buy books for what’s written on their pages, but they are still physical objects, as are CDs and DVDs.  As a physical objects, they take space on our shelves and coffee tables.  They can be loaned to friends or sold to strangers.  Those in the business of publishing would have us think this is wrong.  Of course, if they had their way there would be no libraries either.  They can whine until the end of time, but they cannot convince me that when I am finished reading a book I should throw it away in the garbage or leave it to collect dust on my shelf.  If I want to pass it along to a friend I will.  If I want to sell it to someone else I will.

The music industry fought a losing battle against MP3 for years.  They feared that MP3 made it too easy to steal music.  That is, one person made an MP3 of a song, then posted it online for others to take without paying anything.  They also didn’t like the idea of consumers not having to buy an entire $18 CD when they only wanted one song.  I acknowledge that it isn’t easy to make an argument in favor of loaning MP3s given the lack of physical medium.  The labels now know that they can save a ton on production and distribution in an MP3 world.  Likewise, publishers can save a fortune selling e-books.  Do you think that record labels and book publishers care about record stores and bookshops?  I don’t think they do.

It’s clear to me that everyone is simply trying to get as much money as they can however they can, and will use whatever flawed reasoning it takes to justify their greed.  If publishers could figure out a way to charge a fee for literacy I think they would.

Filed under: Literature and Books, Rantings on December 31st, 2008 | No Comments »

On Fresh Air yesterday, Terry Gross interviewed Lawrence Lessing, a law professor who argues that the changes wrought by the internet require changes in copyright law.  One of the examples he cited of copyright restrictions being overly strict involved a YouTube video of a small child dancing in her own, filmed by her mother for her grandmother to see.  In the background you could hear a song by Prince, which is, presumably, what the girl was dancing to.  YouTube was instructed by the record label to remove the video.  (I know some labels and artists are much stricter about these things, and I know Prince is one of the most strict.)  Lessing made the point that this mother committed a crime by posting this video under current law, but asked if this really should be criminal. That is a particularly good example for him to use, because if you consider how much copyrighted music surrounds us each day, it is very easy to run afoul of the law when videotaping in public.  Imagine that you’re having a fine time hanging out on a game day here in beautiful Gainesville, Florida, and you shoot some video of you and your pals throwing a football around while the food is on the grill and the girlfriends are chatting amongst themselves.  I can almost guarantee that somebody in the camper next to you is going to be playing their radio, and that audio bleeding into your video means that you’re guilty of copyright infringement by posting it online.

We live in the age of file sharing.  Anyone who had a computer in the spring and summer of 2000 (which I dubbed the Summer of Napster), will recall what a big deal file sharing became.  I distinctly remember the sense of urgency many felt when the lawsuits against Napster threatened to shut the service down.  Everyone stayed home by their computers that night in a frantic orgy of downloading before it was too late.  I also remember saying at the time that the world would never go back.  The genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, and once people saw the benefit of having unlimited access to every song they ever loved for free, there would always be a service or program to satisfy that demand.  Napster did eventually end, but the long Summer of Napster continues.

I say all this to make a point about copyright which relates to yesterday’s Fresh Air.  Some argue that, since file sharing is so common, and copyright holders are “losing” so much money (I use quotes because I think that these artists are “losing” sales they never would have made in the first place: i.e., “people” will download Avril Lavigne for nothing, but they wouldn’t pay for it {I use quotes around “people” because I don’t think real humans could like Avril Lavigne}), that we should change the way royalties are collected.  Lawrence Lessing referred to a system in which file sharing is legal, downloads are tracked, and royalties are paid to copyright holders based on the number of downloads.  These fees might be collected from ISPs according to one proposal.  My problem with that system is that it requires people who do not download songs, or download only a few, to pay for the hobby of those who download hundreds or thousands of songs.

Perhaps the best point that Lawrence Lessing made related to the meaning and intent of copyright itself.  If you are like me, you probably assumed that copyright exists to guarantee that the intellectual property of creative individuals remains valuable through protection from theft.  Apparently this is not what the founding fathers intended.  For them, copyright was designed to ensure continued creativity by offering temporary protection from theft of intellectual property.  As Lessing pointed out in the interview, George Gershwin or Robert Frost write music and poetry with the understanding that their creations belong to them.  But since neither man is alive, the copyright that still exists on their works is no longer encouraging creativity at all.  Lessing points out that the constitution expressly forbids perpetual copyright, but Congress’ continued passage of legislation designed to extend copyrights amounts to an endless copyright.

Most of the music I listen to is in the public domain.  Some of it never was copyrighted to begin with.  Anybody could have passed off Bach’s music as his own, even in Bach’s time, and there wasn’t much that could be done.  That’s obviously a bad system given today’s technology.  Still, lack of copyright protection certainly didn’t slow Bach down.  There are well over a thousand pieces in the Schmieder catalog.  But almost everything created in the last hundred years is still in copyright, and considering the value that corporations place on their intellectual property (Mickey Mouse was created in 1928), it’s doubtful that copyright will ever be anything but permanent again.

Filed under: Literature and Books, Music, Rantings, Technology on December 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »