Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, 2010.

The lights lower in the house, and the screen brightens. Two or three commercials play across the screen as you lean over to your fellow cinema-goer to bet on how many trailers you’ll see, and before the first trailer seeks to tempt you into watching a movie that you have no interest in seeing, one final commercial plays: a young person in a convenience store shoves a couple of candy bars and a pop into his knapsack as the storekeeper sells a lottery ticket to an elderly woman, and then the boy takes off, high-tailing it from the store as the narrator’s deep voice says “We know that’s theft—so is stealing movies” as we cut to a young couple staring at a computer whilst slyly grinning at one another. My stomach tightens at the commercial, though I’ve never illegally downloaded a movie. While I could argue against the false equivalence being established in the efforts of this commercial and its brethren, nothing I could essay would be as erudite, as engaging, or as convincing as Lewis Hyde’s recent Common as Air.

Just as in Trickster Makes This World*, Hyde uses analogies and discursive examples to outline an argument that is very difficult to argue against convincingly. In Common as Air, he argues that copyright is broken: that what once existed to help the development of art and discovery now limits and prevents meaningful building on the “shoulders of giants” that have gone before. He proposes reform, asking us to move away from the notion of property to a commons with stints. Hyde develops this proposal with heavy reference both to the ancient structures and strictures of the commons and to the founding fathers or the United States. At times heavily historical, the reader would be forgiven for thinking in the early pages that she was reading more of an history of ideas than a book dealing with what may be the defining issue of our time. The fifth chapter makes heavy use of Benjamin Franklin to show how his work on a number of scientific fronts could not have occurred without heavy debts both to earlier investigations whose results had been freely shared and to his oft-forgotten co-experimenters. Its argument is that the “founders believed that created works belong largely in the commons so as to support and enliven creative communities” (112); the preceding chapters develop our understanding of the commons, and the successive chapters expand this idea and show how it has continuing relevance to our society and culture, with reference to Bob Dylan, the human genome, and the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Hyde captivates the reader both in the argument itself and in his myriad and surprising examples. Dealing carefully with both issues of law and culture, the arguments he makes are persuasive and intriguing. The sceptic—who is willing to agree that theft is theft, and copyright works just fine, thank you—will find himself challenged, and the already converted will need to nuance her arguments in the light of Hyde’s work.

What I find most compelling in Hyde’s new book is an essential underpinning of his argument. A serious problem that our contemporary culture faces is that we tend to conceive of freedom as negative: too often we are concerned about being free from infringements by others. Hyde shows that this way of thinking is backwards when compared with the bulk of thinking about freedom through time.

Social well-being in this view cannot arise simply by aggregating individual choices; private interest and public good are too often at odds. Citizens acquire virtue in the civic republic, therefore, not by productivity but by willingly allowing self-interest to bow to the public good (or by recognizing that the two are one). (93)

True liberty is not freedom from, but rather freedom for, a liberty that is entirely congruent with what is extolled in the Magnificat, for example. I need to spend more time thinking about how Hyde’s arguments are working on my own understanding of what it is to live in the communities in which I make my home.

My sole serious quibble with the book is composed of two lines on the frontispiece: “Copyright © 2010 by Lewis Hyde / All rights reserved.” After he so extolled the virtues of Creative Commons licenses, was there an effort to persuade Farrar, Strauss and Giroux to publish Common as Air under such a license?


* I first fell in love with Hyde’s writing when reading his magnificent Trickster Makes This World. If you haven’t read it, I remind you that old time is still a-flying.)

Julian Barnes, England, England!, 1998.

I reread this novel by Barnes for reasons I cannot clearly explain: sometimes books on the shelves issue calls of loneliness that work their way subliminally to my impulses, asking me to return to worlds and characters and ideas that have grown only faintly familiar. I first read this book in graduate school, when it was recommended to us by the prof for whom I was TA-ing after a discussion on Baudrillard. He suggested—accurately, to my mind—that it would give the reader Baudrillard’s ideas without the lack of fun that accompanies reading Baudrillard (see Browning’s “Development” for a better expression of why this system is actually good pedagogy).

I remembered England, England! as a funny book, one that played with what England was while exploring the idea of the simulacrum and our own living with simulacra. What I didn’t remember was the anger, the ire more akin to a Juvenalian satire than to the Menippean satire I remembered. The plot revolves around a plan to turn the Isle of Wight into a tourist destination: all of the great historical events and places of England will be recreated in better ways, perfect for the quick and unthreatening encounter with history by monied tourists. The structure of the novel is somewhat awkward. The first segment recounts the development of the idea, dominated by the eccentric and forceful billionaire behind the project. The second relates his ouster and the running of England, England!—and the challenges that ensue: the smugglers start smuggling, Robin Hood is mad that Maid Marian won’t put out, and no one actually enjoys with a Dr. Johnson more remarkable for his depression than his witty aperçus, with a host of similar problems to accompany the aforementioned. The new CEO, a woman we readers got to know and like in both the prologue and the first part of the book, struggles both with how to solve the problems and with her own philosophical musings about what the immersion in the milieu is doing to the humans who are coming to over-identify the parts they play. (This latter concern expresses something I often wonder about: what must it do to actors to play roles like Iago day in and day out?) The final segment deals with her life after her own ouster and exile, a return to England (now Anglia) now depressed and restored to an agrarian pastoral idyll that itself is a simulacrum.

It’s in the final segment that the writing finds a balance that I think works; the satire is less angry but still omnipresent, as the villagers re-invent a fair that never-was but is as-they-imagine-it was—England, England! come to England, without the residents paid or paying for the privilege.

The book is not my favourite of Barnes’ oeuvre. It lacks the balance of Flaubert’s Parrot and the staying power of Talking It Over, or the genius of the brilliant A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. The exposition of the theories of Baudrillard, both by the French theorist and by Dr. Max, does not read like a theory lesson but does genuinely engage the reader at the level of story. I enjoyed rereading it, and am left wondering about the rage I perceive in it. Thoughts?

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, 2006.

I crossed another book off my to read list today, and was surprised to see that I’d neither crossed this one off the list nor blogged about it, though I read it shortly after finishing The City of Words back in the fall.

It’s a lovely book, easy to dip into and read from in tiny pieces at a time—and I’m likely biased, given my own predilections and desire to have (what could justifiably be called) a library of my own, rather than a mere trifling collection of books. Manguel offers fifteen reflections on libraries, each loosely structured around a way of conceiving of a library’s import, meaning, and identity. Yet each of these sets of musings are really more about books in general, and—really—about reading. Consider what Manguel writes in “The Library as Island”:

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading—once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive—is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. As our visitor [a gedankenexperiment of a visitor from the past, looking at our reading habits] would eventually realize, in our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room.

Hard to see why I might like such a book as this one, isn’t it? I think Manguel is spot on, here. Our society has come to devalue reading, to marginalise it much as the CBC is currently trying to help marginalise art music. Fewer and fewer people admit to me that they have time to read—does being too busy to read really serve as a commendation of one’s own life? Really?—and when they do, it’s usually to complain that it’s not worth the effort, that television provides better entertainment. Reading, Manguel argued when I heard him speak at McMaster just before he gave the Massey lectures, is what keeps us from being barbarians. My own gloss on this idea is that to read is more than to be entertained: it is to remember stories, moments, vibrant images, ideas; reading is an engagement with the real, and it is restorative, invigorating, challenging, and expansive. Reading helps us to make sense of life, and libraries offer the tools to read and to reread, to find new treasures and to re-encounter anew treasures that are only half-remembered.

Manguel’s book is well worth the time spent reading it (I read it mostly on GO train rides into Toronto), both to wonder about our own relationships with libraries and to think again about what a gift reading is in our lives. And as a fun side benefit, you’ll learn both about neat libraries and about neat books. Add this one to your library. You’ll want to return to it.

Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities, 1997.

I hadn't read anything by Wolf, and this one had been recommended to me. Essentially, Wolf argues that women in our culture have an unfortunate time with their sexuality: they're not taught it well; they're exposed to an enormous number of inappropriate/wrong-headed examples, stereotypes, and media portrayals; they're asked to live within false dichotomies; as adults, they all too often remain uncomfortable with their sexualities because of these experiences.

Wolf goes through a number of reasons and offers a number of examples of why these things are true, performing what amounts to a series of close-readings of culture, history, texts, and experiences (her own and a selected peer-group). These close-readings are well and carefully done, and her arguments are persuasive. My hesitancy with treating this book in more of a sociological perspective, as opposed to a cultural studies perspective is caused by the very limited sample space that Wolf employs for the experiential histories that she incorporates into her work. Her conclusions, though, make a great deal of sense. While I'm not convinced that the suggestions that she offers for taking away the stigmatization that affects women in regards to their sexualities will in any way afford a comprehensive solution to the problems Wolf enumerates, her suggestions certainly offer a sensible beginning and important considerations (particularly for those people raising and teaching young women).

Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, selected by Robert D. Denham.

I love spending time with Frye. Denham's done a good job of selecting a number of intriguing statements, any one of which is worthy of careful thought & reflection.

The problem I had with this book is the problem I have with any collection of aphorisms: one doesn't run into the next, the way the ideas do in Frye's own published work--and one of the thing's that's exciting about Frye is the way each idea produces the next, in a fun interplay that may be the best reason to read him. So: a collection of aphorisms is slow to read, and leaves one with little memory of specific ideas (despite 30+ Book Darts), unlike what a coherent argument produces in me by sympathetic vibrations.

Laura Kipnis, Against Love: a Polemic, 2003.

This book, by Dr. Kipnis, is far from as exciting as its reviews and its cover suggest it might be. The book jacket says that the book "examines the meaning and cultural significance of adultery, arguing that perhaps the question concerns not only the private dilemma of whether or not to be faithful, but also the purpose of this much vaunted fidelity." Fair enough, as things go, but let's make it simpler: she says that while love is fun, it's for the short term--and, in most cases, can't be sustained over the long-term. She's quite forceful in her presentation--one might even say that she's polemical...

Her analysis follows in a Foucauldian mould, investigating structures that exist to exert control on a number of levels--the personal, societal, and so forth.

She begins by pointing out that since love, in its first and initial moments is so very fun, it's not something that should stoop to becoming "work," as marital therapists are so fond of arguing is necessary (there are some quite enjoyable moments of railing against just such therapists, too).

The second chapter suggests that binding monogamy is a type of prison: that it exists based on strictures that prevent, on injunctions, rather than being based on love itself.

In the last of the compelling sections--chapter three--Kipnis offers what feels like a fervid paean to adultery. The excitement, the perils, the fact that adultery is ultimately about stealing time for the new lover lead to new perils. What she's asking is why this excitement fades, and why this experience should be denigrated in the public eye when monogamy is a thing of the past (a point that she most carefully explores in this section).

The final chapter deals with fidelity and adultery as reflective of society. It looks at the changes from the unexamined infidelities of Kennedy to the over-examination now current in modern US political culture. Kipnis argues that the development of fidelity in love-based partnerships as a metaphor for trustworthiness in leadership and governance is a very recent development, and that it's not, ultimately, sustainable simply because of the lack of permanence in modern relationships. Her implied criticism--that would be much stronger if it were made explicit--is that a trope that is doomed to failure should be recognised as such by canny participants, who should essay a move beyond it instead of living within the status quo. Obviously, this chapter moves away from an investigation of the personal aspects of love and adultery, and paradoxically, this movement both succeeds and fails. While the final chapter of the book is intriguing, and while it is perhaps the best argued portion of Kipnis' thesis, it doesn't fit nearly as well with what has gone before. This discontinuity, combined with a negligible conclusion that makes no real effort to sum up her work left me disconcerted and unimpressed.

The book jacket asks "What is the trade-off between personal gratification and the renunciations society demands of us?"; the answer that Kipnis provides is that what we give up is not worth the price. Unfortunately, the book wasn't worth the surprisingly long time it took to read: the pacing forces the reader to slow down, and really, it's just not worth doing. Certainly finishing the book wasn't worth the 75 ¢ fine that I've incurred for returning the book three days late.

Northrop Frye, Lectures on the Bible, reprinted in Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible an Other Religious Texts, volume 13 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye.

I've read--a couple of times--Frye's books on the Bible. Despite knowing his ideas fairly well, it's quite neat to look at these lectures, to try to piece together what changes he makes both when he's presenting the material orally, and when he's talking to students rather than to a (presumably) better educated audience, via the books.

Imre Salusinszky has talked about Frye's career as a spiral curriculum, and anyone who has read much Frye at all realises that NF returns and returns to certain specific concerns--statements like "the function of the metaphor is to release the imagination by paralysing the discursive reason" (468). These lectures are no exception, and they're certainly far from being as detailed an excursion into the world of the Bible than one finds in, say, The Great Code, or Words With Power. Yet they're intriguing in and of themselves to see the manner in which NF shapes his argument. And the conclusion is as good a bit of explanation about how to read the Bible as one can find anywhere in anyone's writings:

You can't argue the poetic statement because it is not a particular statement. It's not subject to verification. So that is why, I think, the Bible presents what it has to say within a narrative and within a body of concrete images which present a world for you to grasp, visualize, and understand. The end that it leads you to is in seeing what it means rather than accepting or rejecting it..." (607)

Some thoughts about The Postmodern Bible

I said the other day that the book reads like a textbook; now nearly finished reading it, I find no reason to disagree with that assessment. I think it does need to be slightly modified, though. This book is a survey text--and at that, a fairly good one--that explains the important ideas that comprise major movements of literary theory: e.g. Reader-response Criticism, Narratological Theory, Deconstruction, Feminist & Marxist theories. It does do a great job of referring the reader to the primary texts, evaluating the various contributions made by the major thinkers of each movement.

Moreover, this text coheres because it does revolve around the application of these movements to a single text that presents unique challenges to those attempting, say, a deconstructionist reading. Having said that about this book's coherence, though, the title is perhaps misleading; the title did mislead me. I came to this book expecting to derive from it a sense of how the Bible is being read by scholars with respect to these theories, not a general introduction to those theories with a few comments about their applicability to the Bible.

So the book has proven a helpful refresher, reminding me of things I struggled to understand when I first began learning about them, and generally confirming the fact that six years of studying literature haven't been entirely wasted. It's this sense of being reminded of details that makes me think that the book might be an excellent text for English 470A at UW, "Contemporary Critical Theory," of which course the description thereof reads:

"Contemporary critical theory offers an array of competing constructions of text and culture. This course examines several topics in recent critical theory, such as gender, race, subjectivity, textuality, and popular culture."

Combined with readings from the primary texts, this book might prove a good way to organise the material that that course was supposed to impart. It's not, however, a book I'd chose if I was teaching a course on the Bible, or even on the Bible and literature.

STC needs--and this is not, for me, a new thought--a good editor. He meanders so.
I like a good meandering as much as the next person, especially when we slip readily from English to Greek to Latin to French. I do have trouble remembering the ultimate purpose, though, of the argument, when we meander so.
My comment the other day about footnotes made something else occur to me, upon rereading. That is, when I pick up the book, it takes me a while to get used to it. There is a rhythm to prose from that time period, a delay that is not present in so much of what I read. I adjust, and am always fairly happy when I recognise that I have done so, but it takes a few moments. Once the adjustment happens, everything is so much easier to follow.
Except for the meandering, sometimes.

From Chapter I: "As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style; first, that not the poem we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry. Second, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious as their diction."

So far today:

from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
- I'm in the middle of chapter two.
- It's amazing how interesting STC's footnotes are. I find that I get lost in their arguments. By the time I'm done reading one, I've forgotten what he was discussing before I jumped to the footnote.

from The Postmodern Bible by "The Bible and Culture Collective"
- I'm reading chapter two, "Structuralist and Narratological Criticism," and hoping it will annoy me less than chapter one ("Reader-Response Criticism") did.
- This book reads overly like a textbook, and so far doesn't seem to be presenting any intriguing new ideas.