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.

29 May 2009

link to: 11:49 [GMT-6]

Grouchy, Chunky Sausages

Oscar the Grouch ain't got nothin' on me.

Professor Tushnet points out something important about the new Star Trek movie: it ignores the difference between individuals and institutions. And, not incidentally, ignores science... but that's another story entirely; or, perhaps, just a story — or at least back story — that should have been in the movie.
This sausage may cause indigestion. People, that paragon of journalistic excellence (do I really need to use the <SARCASM> </SARCASM> tags?), put the American right's favorite unwed teen mother on the cover for the issue now on newsstands (and supermarkets, where it stared me in the face this evening while I was replenishing our supply of Purina^tm Student Chow With Real Pizza Bits). Of course, the student in question was busy making snide — and accurate — remarks about "family values" and wingnuts.¹ Even reading the first couple of sentences of the article on the People website invokes all the fascination of watching a slow-motion train wreck... narrated breathlessly by Daffy Duck.
In any event, sitting across the checkout aisle I saw the item on the left. Which, in the end, is merely another segue into a continuation of my diatribe against Tina "She's Not Really Evil, Just Horribly Misguided" Brown and her latest rant and rave on what she thinks is wrong with publishing.

On one tentacle, Ms Brown isn't exactly the most credible source one could have, as she presided over/caused the twin quality and circulation "crises" at The New Yorker a decade ago and presided over/caused the failure of Talk... and those are both in periodicals anyway, not books, so whether anything she (didn't) learn while "managing" those periodicals applies to books — let alone e-books — is at best open to question. On a second tentacle, her target is an apt one, but not for the reason(s) she thinks: Resale price agreements — functionally what Amazon is doing — are at least questionable under antitrust law.² On a third tentacle, she never actually states what the real conflict is: The continuing struggle over discount rates and how that alters existing publishing contracts... and, in turn, how that alteration relates to the quantity and quality of material provided under those contracts (and, indeed, their very nature).

Which, in a sad way, leads back to those two magazine covers, which reflect the true difference between mass-market periodicals — at least those making money these days — and e-books for the Kindle: Nobody is going to read the former for their content, but the only reason for the latter to exist is their content. That similar antiquated distribution systems and a legacy of appearing on paper are shared between periodicals and e-books has little to do with their real similarities, just as Barack Obama and Felix Frankfurter aren't all that similar despite their shared presidency of the Harvard Law Review. I continue to be befuddled by "businesspeople"'s efforts to make everything similar...
All of which leads into an astounding confluence of idiocy: A claim that "evangelical rationalists" are just another religious movement, leading into more illogical blather from Nicholas Kristof alleging that liberals and conservatives have inherently different means of moral reasoning, not just results (even though ignorant reporters who don't understand scientific reasoning might claim that mammals are "hardwired for morality"). To end this astounding display of inept forced similarities and analogies, there's an attempt to model the irrational (in this instance, "love affairs") with differential equations, when even a mathematician should think to invoke Heisenberg's dilemma. Umm, guys — and, in particular, Mr Love Math — have any of you ever heard of a "field boundary condition"? Or, more to the point, "Fourier transform near an asymptote"?
The Teach for America popularity/controversy actually masks a much more serious question, parallel to the reliance on "Wall Street wizards" over the last couple of decades: Are the purported experts really experts? I strongly question whether the teacher unions, education hierarchy, etc. know a damned thing about dealing with either gifted students or students who are simultaneously gifted and disabled... partially because almost no members of the teaching profession were, themselves, gifted and/or disabled, but primarily because almost none of the leadership in the teaching profession has an education at the college level and beyond that is worth a damn.

I'd argue that anyone teaching high-school-level subjects to students who might potentially go on to get a bachelor's degree in that subject should, him or herself, have a bachelor's degree in that subject... not a watered-down education degree backed up by little, if any, rigor in the subject area. Those teaching literature need to understand what will be expected of their students in college, and one doesn't get that with a B.A.Ed., and so on down the line. In short, the vast majority of our high school teachers are underqualified for the subjects that they're teaching... which leads to disrespect for academic accomplishment, diminished academic accomplishment, lower horizons for everyone, cats and dogs marrying each other, and just generally chaos. Bluntly, too many teachers were themselves marginal students, at least at the college level, and therefore can't even recognize academic gifts, let alone nurture them.

Of course, my definition of "marginal student" is probably a bit different than Joe Sixpack (or Joe the Plumber) would acknowledge as having any validity. My hope is that American students can succeed in pushing the boundaries of knowledge and technology because of their educational preparation in public schools — not in spite of it. In short, I'm a nerd; I value nerds; and the jocks, stoners, etc. can have their places... but not at the expense of the nerds.

Of course, it's really quite difficult to follow Bristol Palin's career path, as not all that many of us have failed major-party candidates for Vice President of the United States for parents. That should be food for thought, especially in conjunction with the last sausage on today's platter.
And, but for a recent misguided Supreme Court opinion that engaged in excessive rhetorical flights of fancy and conclusion-jumping in extending a possible exception to the entire field, per se antitrust violations...

Labels: arts, culture, intellectual property, mass media, miscellany, politics, publishing

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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

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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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