Scrivener's Error

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Scrivener's Error	Law and reality in publishing (seldom the same thing) from the author's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting.

20 April 2009

link to: 10:59 [GMT-6]

What Ingredient List?

Margulies, 20 Apr 09 (resized) It's Monday. I haven't had enough caffeine (and this is a surprise?). Thus, no guarantees on what went into the sausage grinder, let alone what came out. Maybe some of it was spoo.

RIP J.G. Ballard.
The price of not having a First Amendment is that to a repressive government, reporters are intelligence operatives. Most of Europe is only a purchased election away from that result, and Asia is even worse off. But to do a cover-up right, you have to get to the employers, too.
Calling an entire nation "racist" at a summit on racism is virtually guaranteed to get the nations you need to join with to walk out. Of course, that's not surprising, is it? That speech was intended not for the conference, but for the clerics at home.
So, how is Google going to pay for the Google Book Search settlement? How about a £100 million tax avoidance scheme? Meanwhile, the Strange Bedfellows Department is recruiting a number of potential and actual objectors to the proposed settlement, including the Internet Archive, Professor Pamela Samuelson, and Cory Doctorow. Stay tuned as this gets even messier! I'll certainly be throwing a few mud pies of my own, in particular at the Authors' Guild's suitability as class representatives.
Invoking amusing echoes of the auteur movement's egostism, Sarah Weinman deconstructs a minirevolt in British thrillerdom.
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its commercial publication (it's one of the few sort-of-true self-publishing success stories... and only sort-of-true because it was vastly changed when it went commercial), there's a mini-tempest brewing over whether Strunk & White's The Elements of Style is a good book. Some critics accurately criticize some of the grammatical analysis. Everyone is missing two salient points, though: That this little book (at least in the second edition; the third and later editions are a mess) is only a starting point, and that the alternatives that have been available have been much worse in most respects. One good example is the overpraised Zinsser book; the grammatical advice is, on the whole, not much (if any) better, and the examples are constrained by the author's (perceived, and incorrect) 300-word limit on fair use.

The Strunk & White Elements of Style — for all its faults — represented a change in pedagogical models as much as anything else. Writing instructors were no longer tied to an exhausting, and exhaustive, set of polemically chosen readings as source materials for their students. Instead, instructors could choose support readings appropriate to the needs and interests of their students — articles from Science for the biologists, from PMLA for the English majors, and from Orwell for everyone.

Then there's the price point. The primary problem with most "writing guides" is that they're too long, too ill-organized, and mostly too expensive. There's a lot less incentive to resell a $2.95 mass-market paperback at the end of the semester. Strunk & White isn't a perfect reference work; but the perfect is often the enemy of the good enough... as the Third and Fourth Editions of Strunk & White itself demonstrate by their very existence.

In the end, Strunk & White is a tool. Like any tool, it has its limitations. Unlike most of its competitors, however, it doesn't pretend to be any more than a starting point... and I, for one, would be reluctant to saddle a beginning woodworker with professional-grade chisels at the same time I expect him or her to make do with a hammer from the nearest discount hardware store and work with home-improvement-store lumber using a battered old carpenter's square as the only available measuring tool.

Labels: civil rights, copyright, intellectual property, miscellany, politics, publishing

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All material © 2003–12 except where otherwise indicated. All rights reserved. This blawg does not use the Creative Commons License, although I'm usually pretty good-natured about permissions for attributed reuse.

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Sausages?

Internet link sausages, as frequently appear here, are gathered from uninspected meaty internet products and byproducts via processes you really, really don't want to observe; spiced with my own secret, snarky, sarcastic blend; quite possibly extended with sawdust or other indigestibles; and stuffed into your monitor (instead of either real or artificial casings). They're sort of like "link salad" or "pot pourri" or "miscellaneous musings" (or, for that matter, "making law"), but far more disturbing.

I am not responsible for any changes to your lipid counts or blood pressure from consuming these sausages... nor for your monitor if you insist on covering them with mash or sauce.

Archives

Warped Weft

Now live at the new site. I have arranged some of the more infamous threads that have appeared here by unravelling them from the blawg tapestry (and hopefully eliminating some of the sillier typos). Sometimes, the threads have been slightly reordered for clarity.

Links of Interest

Links open in a new window.

Writer Beware and the Writer Beware Blog provide essential knowledge for writers who don't want to be ripped off
Writing-World.com published by the former managing editor of the now-defunct Inklings
Agent Research & Evaluation provides both free and paid analyses of literary agents
US Copyright Office, including both registration forms and records and quite a bit of other helpful information
Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) allows searches of granted, pending, and some rejected trademark registrations
US Supreme Court Opinions from the current and past couple of terms
Law Library of Congress includes statutes for free
The Public Library of Law can help you find the law... but not use it in court, as many of its resources are not in proper form and do not provide all of the citation information needed in court papers
Legal, free e-books are available through Online Books (University of Pennsylvania) and Shakespeare (MIT)
Legal, free music is available through
- ClassicCat.net (what kind of music do you think you'll find here?)
- Music.Download.com (long-awaited successor to MP3.com)
- Janis Ian (artist)
- John McCutcheon (artist)

Other Blawgs, Blogs, and Journals

These may be of interest; I do not necessarily agree with opinions expressed in them, although the reasoning and writing are almost always first-rate (and represent a standard seldom, if ever, achieved in "mainstream" journalism). I'm picky, and have eclectic tastes, so don't expect a comprehensive listing.

A blawg is sort of like a blog on legal issues, but usually has a lot more links to outside resources (other than other blogs) than does a typical blog. Scrivener's Error is a blawg, not just a blog. You can find other blawgs at < ? law blogs # >.

How Appealing is aimed at appellate lawyers and legal news in general. If you care about the state of the law, start here — Howard's commentary is far better balanced, better informed, and better considered than any of the media outlets. To concentrate on the Supreme Court, don't forget SCOTUSBlog.
Some academics' blawgs with a variety of political (and doctrinal) viewpoints:
- Professor Anthony Arend (Georgetown Law)
- Professor Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA Law) (aka "The Perfesser")
- Professor Jack Balkin (Yale Law)
- Professor Dennis Crouch (Missouri Law) (better known as Patently-O)
- Professor Michael Froomkin (University of Miami Law)
- Professor Eric Goldman (Santa Clara University Law)
- Professor Rick Hasen (Loyola-LA Law)
- Professor Brian Leiter (U of Chicago Law/Philosophy)
- Professor Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law)
- Professor Michael Madison (Pitt Law)
- Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law)
BoingBoing, by speculative fiction writer (and 'net activist) Cory Doctorow, is quite hostile to copyright enforcement efforts, particularly regarding file-sharing
The main European IP blawg of interest remains the UK-based IPKat, on a variety of intellectual property issues, with some overlap (with a less Eurocentric view) at IPFinance
Cyberlaw (Stanford) has its agenda grounded firmly in the so-called "digital commons," which might make a bit more sense if any of the advocates of that viewpoint understood diddly-squat about population ecology
The American Constitution Society blawg is a purportedly "liberal" counterweight to the so-called "Federalist Society" (which, despite its claims, should be called "Tory Society") that has yet to establish much coherence... but maybe that's all to the good.

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