BREAKING NEWS: SNARKY NAY-SAYER TURNS OUT TO BE PLAGIARIST

I've been increasingly interested in how electronic publishing is changing the possibilities for writing and publishing.  Like most people, I tend to think that it will allow whole new genres of writing, and will also give power to writers whose work might be very good quality but might not necessarily appeal to a wide enough audience to justify the intensive capital involved in mainstream publishing.

In the course of this, a friend of mine emailed me the following link where the author very cleverly shows that in fact mainstream publishing is the friend of the little guy and that e-publishing will fail to perform all the services that traditional publishing does.  My friend wanted to make the point that the article was full of specious reasoning (simply because it was).  But I was so amused by the clever writing, which in no way suffered from a smarmy, know-it-all tone to notice the many faulty assumptions.  And unlike my friend, who assumes that there are talented and discerning writers and readers outside of the ranks of the professional publishing world, I have no such illusions.

So I was delighted.

Imagine my shock when, in the course of researching the rise of the printing press to show that it was both inevitable and the end of history (the end result of this research will be a book called The Phenomenology of Random House), I came across the following satire from 1448:

Could it be?  Could my know-it-all nay-sayer be a plagiarist?  But his ideas are so original.

I've included the manuscript I uncovered below.  I invite readers to compare it to this link.

I report.  You decide.

Image via Wikipedia

CHARACTERS:

HEINRICH GUTENBERG, a modern-thinking man with exciting ideas
JOHANNES PONZI, a humble writer
GRETA PONZI, the wife of a humble writer

ACT I

SCENE OPENS ON GUTENBERG and PONZI, standing.

GUTENBERG: The book-copying  world is changing! In the future, authors will no longer need those fat cat middle men known as “monasteries” to get in the way of their art! It will just be the author and his audience!

PONZI: Won’t I need an abbot? Or a copyist? Or an illuminator? Or a quill dipper? Or a church theologian to verify the orthodoxy of the work?  Or a library to copy the books from?  Or other monastic orders and highly moneyed institutions to purchase the few copies of the book I can write?

GUTENBERG (waves hand, testily): Yes, yes. But all those things you can do yourself or with a few non-monastic folks.

PONZI: And I’m supposed to write the manuscript, too?

GUTENBERG (snorts): As if writing was hard. Now go! And write your philosophical tract!

PONZI goes off to write his philosophical  tract[1]. GUTENBERG stands, alone, on stage, for several months. Eventually PONZI returns, with a book.

GUTENBERG: You again! What took you so long?

PONZI: Well, I had write the book. Then I had to have it re-written, re-copied, illuminated, act as my own scribe and pay to send notice to other monasteries  . It cost me thousands of guilders out of my own pocket and the better part of a year. But look! Here’s the manuscript!

GUTENBERG (pulls out his knife): I’m sorry, I only read bound books[2].

PONZI sighs, slinks off the stage.

GUTENBERG (yelling after PONZI): And where are the scholia? Why aren’t you writing more?!?

ACT II

It is A YEAR LATER. SCENE OPENS on GUTENBERG and PONZI, standing.

GUTENBERG: I’m still waiting for that scholia, you know.

PONZI: I spent all my money last year making that first manuscript. And no other monastic orders were interested.

GUTENBERG (sneers): Well, what did you expect? The argumentation was sloppy, the illumination was atrocious, the content was heretical and the vellum looked like it had been bought by a mendicant. Who would want to read and copy that?

PONZI (dejected): I know.

GUTENBERG: Seriously, what were you thinking.

PONZI: But that’s my point! I want to get professional illumination and scribing and vellum manufacture, but I just can’t afford it.

GUTENBERG (smiles): PONZI, you naive fool. Don’t you realize that thanks to the current economy we live in, men of letters are desperately looking for work! Surely some of them will work for almost nothing! Scratch that — they’ll work for exactly nothing!

PONZI: Is that ethical? To get work from people without paying them?

GUTENBERG: Of course it is. They’ll profit from the exposure.

PONZI: I don’t think a copyist is going to want to be paid in exposure.

GUTENBERG: Then release the book through a printing press to get past all the production costs.

PONZI: Yes! And then sell it for a reasonable price!

GUTENBERG (shrugs): Well, do what you want. I’ll be getting it from a pirate press.

PONZI: What?

GUTENBERG:  Other presses can do the type-setting for cheaper!  How much do you expect me to pay for the authorized edition?

PONZI: So, pay people nothing to help me create a book I make nothing on, for people who will refuse to pay for it.

GUTENBERG: I wouldn’t put it that way. But yes.

GUTENBERG and PONZI stand for a moment, silent.

PONZI: I’m trying to remember if you participated in the reformation

GUTENBERG (snorts): As if I’d participate in heresy.

ACT III

SEVERAL MONTHS have passed. SCENE OPENS on GUTENBERG and PONZI, standing.

GUTENBERG: Dude, where the fuck are the scholia? I’m dying over here.

PONZI: Well, I was going to write it, but when I tried to find illuminators and vellum workers to work on it for free, I kind of hit a road block. The ones who were good wouldn’t work for free, and the ones that were free weren’t good.

GUTENBERG (rolls his eyes): Well, duh. I could have told you that.

PONZI: But…

GUTENBERG: But that’s not important now. What’s important is that we get you writing again.

PONZI: But I don’t have the money to make another manuscript with monastic help, and I don’t have the time to make another manuscript on my own.

GUTENBERG: As it happens, I have a solution for you. And look, here she is.

ENTER Greta  PONZI from STAGE LEFT.

GUTENBERG: Frau. PONZI, a word, please.

GRETA: Yes?

GUTENBERG: As you may know, your husband is a writer. But he is finding it difficult to do writing recently because of issues of cost and time. I know that you are the organized, financially-minded person in your relationship, so allow me to suggest to you that you become his abbot, or abbess as the case may be. While he writes, you locate and pay for an illuminator, a copyist, a librarian, a monastic order, a theologian and a network of other abbeys. This will leave him free to focus on his craft, and the sholia I so desire.

GRETA: I see. And you propose I fund these people how?

GUTENBERG: Well, I’m sure I don’t know, Mrs. PONZI, but I have faith in your ability to do so.

GRETA: So to recap, you want me to give up my life of leisure and devote all my time to my husband’s career.

GUTENBERG: Of course not! I never said for you to give up your life of leisure.  You need the social connections.

GRETA: Ah. Could you come over here for just a second?

GUTENBERG (walks toward KRISTINE): Yes?

GRETA clocks GUTENBERG in the head, stunning him, then rips off his testicles, stuffs them into his mouth and sets him on fire while he chokes on them. GUTENBERG dies.

GRETA (to PONZI): You. Find a fucking monastery.

PONZI: Yes, dear.

CURTAIN FALLS.

---

[1] It is interesting to note that the plagiarist chose to use a novel, given the fact that novels would not have existed as a genre without the development of the printing press.

[2] Kudos to the plagiarist, for figuring out how to update the joke that early printed books had to be cut open, something illuminated manuscripts didn’t need.

Dr J, Dr A and the Amazing Ra'

So Dr. J and I are totally serious about applying to be on the amazing race.
Now once we get on, you all know that we're going to be seriously awesome, or at least you do if you read our blogs.
But first we have to get on.
And here's where you, our online internet community come into play.
As Dr. J put it in our initial consult, the two chief considerations to being a successful reality  TV contestant are:

1) being smoking hot

and

2) being bastshit insane.

I'm not sure if those were her exact words but I think that was the basic point.

Now, 2 is arguably true of me at least, but more in a neurotic way than the psycho in-your-face, I-dont-apologize-for-who-I-am way that the reality shows love.  As anyone who knows me will tell you, I always apologize for who I am.

And although I'm sure those of you who know us will say that 1) is true too, you'll have to admit that in neither case is it in the telegenic football QB/cheerleader way (although Dr. J. at least has the glee pipes).

So our strategy is probably going to be centered around the fact that we're philosophers which is a little bit interesting, right?  There are always one or two of the "smart" rather than "athletic" teams on there, and it's always delightful when they do stupid things (as I'm sure we would).

But what more specifically?  Well, we've been thinking of playing up the fact that in truth we haven't spent tons of time together in person.  We know one another from grad school but we weren't particularly close (or distant than) and we only overlapped a bit --- I had just about finished up coursework when Dr. J. started and she transferred to a different program soon thereafter.

Where we've become really good friends is online and also at conferences (which only happen so often and which occupy kind of a weird space anyway) --- so we're thinking of playing up that unknown factor --- we can probably make that seem like it has more potential for conflict than it really does --- take a look at the questions in the application I linked to above and you'll see what I mean.

Neither of us sees anything against the rules about blogging the process so I'm totally soliciting feedback from you guys about how we should proceed and I'll post some of my answers as I get them.

But the bigger question for right now is how to handle the 3 minute video required, particularly since Dr. J. and I live about 1000 miles apart.  Here's what we're thinking right now.

Dr. J. and I are both teaching bored classes at our respective institutions and speaking the worst sort of academicese bullshit.  Students are asleep.  We both walk out and say screw it and call one another up and talk about how it's time to finally do AR.

We talk back and forth about how awesome we're going to be because we're so smart, sophisticated and clever.

Meanwhile our students are trash-talking us and talking about how eccentric and impractical we are.

Thoughts?

Globe-Trotting Philosophers

You know the TV show, the Amazing Race?
You know what's been missing from it?
Not enough teams with wisdom and razor-sharp wit to match.
People who read my blog and the blog of my good friend and fellow philosopher, Dr. J., know that we both have both qualities in spades.
So what do you think?  Should we apply to be on the show or what?  If we do, we'll blog the whole process.

Oh, Happy Baby Jesus Day!

The Winter Solstice, wherein the Ideas Family Holds a Constitutional Convention

Recently, I had the idea of using the game nomic to help manage our precocious little 5-year old philosopher/lawyer.  Here's a fragment of how that's gone.

Ideas Woman:  Turns will be suspended for constitutional convention where Ideas Girl and Ideas Man will make new rules, called Constitutional Rules of the Family.  Later there will be a review and amendment process during which the final form of the document will be decided upon, line by line.  At this point Ideas Woman and Ideas Boy can propose any changes also.  The Constitutional Rule of the Family  which will be voted on as a whole and accepted or rejected as a whole.  Ideas Girl must call consitutional convention to order.  Passed Unanimously.

Constitutional Convention

I. Ideas Girl:  This Constitutional Convention is called to order.  Ideas Man will preside.

II.  Ideas Man:  I propose we start with family goals.  Instead of winning or losing, these will be goals that will help whole family win.  Ideas Girl and Ideas Man will discuss first set of goals, but when we ratify constitution, Ideas Boy and Ideas Woman can add new goals.

III.  Goals:

1.  Talk with one another peacefully and respectfully.
2.  Take turns making new rules.
3.  Work to solve problems together.  If someone has a problem, everyone helps solve it.
4.  Have as much time to play; avoid time-outs.
5.  Resolve conflicts peacefully.
6.  Tell Mom or Dad if you wanna go in the snow by yourself.
7.  Help everyone succeed at school and work and home.
8.  Girl goal [proposed by Ideas Boy]
9.  Boy goal [proposed by Ideas Girl]
10.  Everyone can have their own goals.  If their goals fit in with the family goals, the whole family will help them achieve their goals.
11.  Daddy goal
12.  We take everyone's voice into consideration when making rules.

IV.  Ammon:  I propose we have family values.  Values are qualities that we all try to use to help one another out.  We try to promote these values.

Respect
Tolerance
Love
Family-Centeredness
Daddy
Mommy
Patience
Fun
Friendship

V.  Family Rules

1.  Boogy
2.  Everybody has to love each other.
3.  When we get home, we put our coats and shoes and backpacks and scarfs and anything else we brought in from the car away where it goes, and throw the garbage in the garbage.
4.  Zazee Gagee.
5.  At meal-time, we all help to prepare the meal in a way appropriate for our age.
6.  Lovey.
7.  We make our best effort to get to school and work pronto, which means on time.
8.  Eat all your meal.
9.  The family will have meals together.  Everyone will try the main food, unless it conflicts with one of their values.  If they don't like it they can say "Je n'aimes pas," which in French means I do not like it, in which case they do not have to have anymore and they
can propose something else simple to prepare.
10.  Every favorite food has to be vegetarian.
11.  Everyone can choose their own favorite food.
12.  You have to goo-goo gaga if you're a baby.
13.  We respect one another's bodies.  We do not physically hurt them, including by accident.
14.  A goo-goo gaga is a silly zoo-zoo.
15.  We control our own bodies, using appropriate actions and remaining calm.
16.  If I goo-goo ga ga you suck your finger.  Ha ha
17.  Put your clothes away:  put clean clothes in their drawers or closets.  Put dirty clothes in the hamper.
18.  We don't eesza.  Kiki sasa.
19.  We like rules.
20.  Twenty-two is your favorite number because roaring dinousar walk down the street.  When they were silly gillies.  If they walk down the street, they do it again and again and again.  What do they do when they do it again and again and again.  They should be nice to other dinosaurs like we should do.  Mine is good.
21.  If you toot, just say "excuse me" because everybody toots.
22.  We wake up in the morning, neither too late nor too early (which means on school-days between 6:30-7:00).  Otherwise Daddy or Mommy will have to wake you up by saying "Wake-up" --- if it's too early, you stay quietly in your own room.
23.  If goo-goo gaga comes in to dinosaurs should be nice to each other.  If they don't be nice to each other, they are in trouble from Mommy or Daddy and if he sits there or she sits there and moves around they shouldn't do that then they should quietly sing on that log or tree.  If your Mom or Dad calls you back you should just come back or just sitting there if you want to but you have have to tell your mom you want to stay there quietly.
24.  If you are under 4 you need to take a nap.  You should lie in your bed or crib and rest until you're ready to wake up.
25.  Don't run away from your Mom and Dad.
26.  Mommy and Daddy might have to use physical restraint to protect the children, but they will only do so for the benefit of the children and to the minimum degree required.
27.  You can't unbuckle yourself in the car if Mommy or Daddy is still driving because it's very dangerous.  It might be like an airplane flight or you might be in a model car with no buckles, and if you're a kid you might be able to sit in the front but only if you're still like Elena is.
28.  We clean up after ourselves --- including putting away toys, books, dishes, work.  If we are working on something together, we will clean it up together.  If someone wants to help they may, but they have to ask and it is the responsibility of the initial person to make sure everything is put away orderly.
29.  Ideas Girl must put her head on Daddy's head.         
30.  If you are sillly, you have to go to the bathtub.
31.  Everyone must bathe at least every other day.  If Mommy or Daddy decides that someone is dirty, they have to take a bath even if they did the day before.  And if you poop your pants you have to take a bath even during the day (since we usually do it [baths] at night.  If you're a goose you have to go to the bath, too.
32.  Go potty-poopy when a goose is on the potty because it's silly.
33.  Once a week, we make sure the whole house has been cleaned.  Mommy and Daddy are responsible for making sure the public areas are cleaned but Ideas Girl and Ideas Boy can help (and can be required to help) in age-appropriate ways.  Everyone is responsible for making sure their own room is cleaned.

Whereupon the convention was called to recess.

Ideas Man and the Da Vinci Code

In which I waste about an hour being awesome.

voicethread.com/share/808565/

Walking on the Ground of the Earth (A Fragment from the Book of Prometheus)

Memphis will continue, but when I was writing it by hand, Ideas Girl asked me if I'd write a Zeus story. Here one is.

Walking on the ground of the Earth

Patroclus and Briseis, Eight Years Later

My dear, sweet love. What are we doing here? Why do we wander amidst these rocks, this stony landscape. Why were we in the heat of the sands? What wind blasted us here?

You don’t remember walking then?

Walking, yes, after falling.

Nothing moves for us, my dear. We are walking over the stones and the snow and the sand, our feet crunch the timeless earth.

It changes beneath us.

It is timeless. Let us go, therefore you and I, down to the river banks, to the Tigris, to the Tiber, down the banks of the Hudson, where a silver eagle splashes in the icy, dirty water, though we were not there. Let us go. And here, on the snowy rocks, let us walk against time. The earth is bloodied, but what of it? We walk against time, we walk in such a way that blood is not spilled. It blooms like a flower shooting from the snowy stones, it grows and makes the neck of the child whole.

You steal everything. You stole that, my dear, from Homer.

No, my dear, I stole it from Achilles. I stole it from his wrath.

Why was he angry, my dear?

Because Patroclus, his beloved, had been killed. And so he killed Hector.

But it’s so absurd. You are Patroclus. I am Briseis. And we are together now.

But where were we? I feel that we were in two places at once. A steel city, a cage high above the earth, we paced its ladders. We were impatient to be with one another. But you were with Agamemnon, I was with Achilles. They hated one another and there was nothing we could do.

It’s not as though we were Romeo and Juliet, you know.

That’s true. We are together. We were also together, in red canyons where the water lapped against the steep sides of the red walls. Slender green shoots clung from the sides of the rocks where the water slapped the walls. Tender young vines crept up the slick wet walls, heading up towards heaven. Up there, there was another city, of marble and sand. A great, dusky horizon. Kallipolis, the slender jewel of a kingdom that never was.

But we were there.

And it was burning.

True.

What lay between them?

Silly love, you know what lay between them. Prometheus told you.

Ideas Man Goes to Memphis Part 2A

[Note: Rather than leave such long posts with such long spaces between posting, I'll try posting in shorter chunks --- if this is annoying or breaks up the flow too much, let me know and I'll go back to bigger chunks.]

Part Two

Within seconds of entering the museum, everything was what it was again. This was a museum, and I would have loved to visit the museum, but I wasn't there to visit the museum. I didn't have time to visit the museum, and visiting hours were over anyway. We were led to the museum's comfortable auditorium, well-lit, appointed tastefully but anonymously. We should have been about 20 minutes late, but by the look of things, they must have started late themselves because the first speaker was still giving what was clearly an impromptu preamble about the conference, the setting and her visit to Memphis before launching into her paper proper.

Although we weren't that late, the auditorium was full enough, the rows of seats laid out in such a fashion, that it would be impossible to sit down without some disturbance. I bee-lined to a single seat near the back that I only had to step over a couple of people in taking. Someone else braved an empty seat up front but off to the side. The rest of our company of stragglers made do with the upholstered wall curving around the back, partitioning the auditorium from the rest of the museum, and within minutes I was beyond the comma I'd been in, beyond the shock that had roused me from that comma. I was ensconced again in the comfortable world of academia, the world I essentially grew up in and have never really left. I was ensconced in that world, but there was lodged within me the memory of what had happened, what lay outside, that bigger world of America. Heim aber unheimlich.

My last little bit of German, which I'll leave untranslated, pays homage to a whole philosophical world-view that some might recognize, but that I'll contextualize nonetheless. I hope all of you will forgive an extremely long excursus.

Excursus: Tribes and Categories

What lay outside? America? Really? America, whose parts do not all make a whole --- where exactly is that? America, where I've always more or less been. America, where I've more or less always been. The longest I've been out of the country was a five or so month stint in Mexico. Not much beyond that, a couple of three or four week trips to Italy, lots of shorter jaunts to Canada and Mexico, a ten day trip when I was ten, the first time I'd ever flown on an airplane (we estimate that at five, the world-weary Ideas Girl has already taken 25 airplane flights). I don't know whether I should count the years in my head that I've lived in Greece and in her fictional colonies, a guest of the titan Prometheus. Someday maybe I'll write about that. But perhaps that's still America. It's not as though America is a self-enclosed whole.

Let's divide groups up into tribes and categories (I'm thinking here of groups that make up parts of America, but that isn't essential quite yet). The difference between a tribe and a category is that in a tribe, there are real historical connections that tie its members together, whereas in categories there are qualities that all members of a group are recognized as having. Those of you who know Spinoza can think of this as the difference between the real modal connections (known by third-order knowledge) and attributes (known by second-order knowledge).

Tribes

I think that the tribes that are the most important to me are: 1) my family, the Ideases first and foremost along with the rest of my immediate family and their kids, and a small subset of my enormous extended family. 2) the "social" subset of my colleagues, those of my colleagues who are also personal friends, and 3) a very small subset of the members of my various social circles from childhood --- and I'd extend this to college and to include a few good friends who I met in the Mormon world of Philadelphia, because and was although I didn't know them until I had lived in Philadelphia and was technically (although barely) an adult, they all turned out to be separated from the groups of my childhood by just one degree. This will be true of virtually any of a certain kind of Mormon, just as I can go to any academic conference and find someone one degree removed from my tribe #2. This is how we navigate the massive country we live in without succumbing fully to the alienation that breeds fascism. It's what had allowed me to have such a fantastic day in Memphis, a town I'd never been anywhere near before.

By the process of what structural anthropologists would call lines of alliance, I'd also include much of what are for Ideas Woman the equivalent of Tribes #1,2 and 3. By intersecting lines of filiation and alliance (lines of affiliation, lets say), I'd add the tribe forming around the Ideas Kids' social world (some of the families of my children's friends, or the people that I know in my context as a father). Because I am, after all, the titular head of the Ideas Clan, I may as well think of this as my Tribe #4.

Let's give these four tribes names. We'll call #1 The Big Ideases, #2 The SPEP Squad, #3 The Happy Valleys, and #4) The Toledottawa Hilliards. The Tribes of course aren't mutually exclusive. My colleague in the Anthropology department of my university, who I know through my kids' school, or my neighbor in Philly who is also an English professor, both belong to the SPEP Squad & The Toledottawa Hilliards, and my brother's family who live just a mile from where we lived in Philly fit into the Big Ideases and the Toledottawa Hilliards. There are the connections forged after the fact. My colleagues who got jobs at the university a mile from where I grew up and who have as colleagues some of my parents' friends and as students my siblings' friends and my old friends' siblings have the privilege of being part of the Happy Valley SPEP Squad. Then there are the truly weird connections that the Facebook reveals: that my colleague's partner got her Master in Library Science's with my cousin (Big Ideas --- SPEP Squad), that the guy whose family my family hung out with during a kick-ass parade turns out to be friends with a guy I know from graduate school and both of our first post-graduate jobs (Toledottawa Hilliards SPEP Squad). And so on.

Another thing to notice is that my Tribes mostly consist of Americans, but there are non-Americans in all 4 groups: immigrants to America, ex-pats living abroad, temporary visitors to America, foreigners who have always lived abroad and maintain only tangential tribal connections to America. We'll have occasion to think about this more later. But let's move on to categories.

Categories

I think that the categories that are most important to how I understand myself are: 1) intellectuals, 2) Mormons (even if this is by a complex relationship of upbringing, culture and rejection), and 3) the political/social/cultural ideology that I identify with, often called liberal or progressive (both terms I'm uncomfortable with), often erroneously equated with being part of the Democratic party (though the Democratic party is a much bigger tent and though this wing's loyalty to the Democratic party is by no means absolute). I'll just call it the Left for now.

Now, certainly these three categories will end up being important in manifold ways to the tribes that I listed above. They have a lot to do with how those tribes are constituted, and they tell you a lot about how I personally inhabit those tribes. But they are a different way of conceptualizing the world. Because we don't immediately present our tribes to the world (at least not in the way I'm using the term here), we will find that however much we identify ourselves tribally, others --- particularly others from outside of our tribes, unaware of all that tribal belonging entails --- will identify us categorically first.

And I'm not so naive as to be blind to the fact that I've left out three categories which are quite important to how other Americans will identify me, particularly insofar as they are the categories people are most inclined to use in anonymous contexts, contexts laid bare of any other social indicators. These categories are, in no particular order: 1) my whiteness, 2) my maleness, and 3) my upper-middle-classness (I'd prefer to say "professionalness" as a more accurate designator of the socio-economic class I'm talking about, but I'll acquiesce to more familiar, if slightly misleading, usage). Although none of these three things are inherent in me, these three things are the three things that I think most Americans will most easily "read" into me without any other cues (Some people might include my age or generation, but I don't think that's salient in the same way, at least not for our present purposes).

The reasons that I list these categories separately from the categories of "Intellectual" or "(ex)-Mormon" or "Leftist" (categories themselves enmeshed in the other categories in fairly obvious ways) is that they aren't particularly important to how I identify myself, and I like to think that they aren't particularly important to how I identify myself, while the others are. Now I'm fully aware 1) that my identification with these categories probably does in fact orient me in ways that I am unaware of --- that I probably even blind myself to; and 2) that the very possibility of not identifying with these categories depends upon the normative privilege these categories enjoy. An outsider should feel free to explain to me what 1) and 2) mean concretely. Once the outside is done with that I'll move on in Part 2B to talking concretely about my reasons for saying that I don't find my identification with these categories to be particularly important to me.