Anyway, Idaho's about as conservative as it gets in the US, and there's some inappropriate jokes I won't repeat here about the way that state works. It's a place where a lot of the culture was brought in by people working for the ol' AEC back in the 1950s, although I understand that some hipsters are indeed beavering away here and there, trying to make the state a little safer for diversity.
]]>I am used to getting that argument from reactionaries so I hate it.
"Homosexuality is in fact illegal. You may not approve of this: But it's the way the law works."
My instinct when I hear that line is to work to change the law.
Which parts of DRM are good and should be left unchanged? It looks like you want to keep the part that makes Clean Reader illegal. What else in there is good?
]]>In this context DRM (which Charlie is passionately against) is a straw man.
]]>Good for you! That's how change works.
DRM is generally bad and stupid: this is one of the rare situations where my principled opposition to it is undercut by an equally offensive bit of bogosity.
The real solution requires us to take a step back and ask why we have copyright ... and via a hop, a skip, and a jump exposes one of the many failure modes of capitalism and highlights the need for a better way to structure our entire society.
]]>But the original copyright laws were very different from what we have now.
]]>I doubt that it would catch even the relatively modern southern English ones, let alone the ones in Burns etc. If it did, LOTS of texts would become unintelligible!
]]>Or the reverse -- "idiot" became disfavored because it started getting applied to dumb people instead of just to mentally retarded people. More recently, advocates for the disabled have tried to get people to stop using "retarded" because they feel it's pejorative of their clients. "Special" got used for a while until it fell to the same fate. Last I heard, we're now supposed to use "differently abled". Well, isn't that special. The vocabulary gets revised because advocates don't want words with negative connotations applied to their clients -- but the reality is that any word used to denote their clients will end up with negative connotations over time, because mental retardation is so very unfortunate to be afflicted with.
But I digress.
Charlie, all of this is doubleplusungood. Just write more fucking novels and get the goddamned things published, 'k? I'd hate to see your style change just to get around the word filters. "Shitfuckcuntbollockscludge, it's Nyarlathotep!" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
]]>One of the most influential novels from my youth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
]]>When the first Harry Potter book was sold in the US, the title was changed (leading to much confusion in Canada where we saw both British and American editions). I just assumed that the reason was to keep children from asking their parents what a philosopher was, because the parents themselves wouldn't be able to answer the question.
As noted above: "The app is the brainchild of a mother and father from Idaho" Are we sure we can use the term 'brainchild"? Was the app conceived during a mindfuck?
I recall the early US TV appearance of the Rolling Stones, when they performed "Let's Spend Some Time Together." Later, when the US and (by association? shared market?) Canada got the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" stickers it soon occurred to most musical acts that the stickers drove sales. I remember Iggy Pop had one cover with "Parental Advisory: This is an Iggy Pop record"
With that in mind, how far could you go? You could very well go deep. Very deep. Repeatedly, even. I don't think you'd have to mess up the experience for the majority of your readership, though. One well crafted shorter work, say a novella that breaks the Clean Reader would be enough to boost the word-of-mouth among those unfamiliar with your works. "He's the author who broke/crashed CR, check out this Rule 34, or Equoid etc.
Incidentally, the critic who authored "the author doesn't know what they mean anyway" must be taken to include him or herself as an author. To such critic one might reply: while you may not know what you mean, it does not follow that all authors share your difficulty.
Also incidentally re #176, there was talk well over a decade ago about higher resolution CD formats arriving, and to some extent now, they have, but they haven't swept the market. I read a piece back then that predicted lack of market penetration based in part by some study that found an alarming percentage of stereo owners had each speaker in a different room.
]]>I agree.
However this was at one time a popular view and spread by University English Departments. See specifically Whimsatt and Beardsley 'The intentional fallacy', which argues the author's intention in any text might be interesting but is neither available nor relevant to a critical reading. The text was supposed to stand for itself as a discrete artefact. This was more or less the defining position of the New Critics, or the T.S.Eliot through to F.R. Leavis intergenerational gang. Like many of their positions, it may influence some people to this day but for the most part has fallen out of the mainstream. Tacitly dropped even earlier.
The focus of Marxist criticism, which became popular in in the 70s and 80s and has - as far as I understand these things - simply been absorbed into the mainstream, is less on the intention of the specific author and more on the discourse from which the text emerges, its social conditions and the place of the author in those. And perhaps this edges back toward that initial proposition, in that it would provide a mechanism for reading OGH at the same time as, to pick a cross-thread example, that Wright fellow (or even BT or LC, both of whom I admit I find unintelligible) that enables some understanding of their places in their surrounding discourse.
Or something, anyway. I've been out of that sort of world for a long, long time. One of these days taking up these tools again may be worthwhile, not clear for what exactly though. It's a really long road to try to join ontology in the compsci sense to the text-analytical world.
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