The New Freedom

Jump to Comments

Right now I’m working as a courier. That means I spend pretty much all of my time in my car delivering rich people’s mail while listening to music or audio books or the radio. This morning I was listening to ‘Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane’ on WHYY, my local NPR affiliate, and as usual it was an author talking about their latest book.
Today it was Jonathan Lethem(wikip link, personal home) talking about his new book, “You Don’t Love Me Yet.” (I thought I hadn’t heard of him before, but turns out he’s the author of Gun, With Occasional Music, which gets mentioned on BoingBoing sometimes.) The thing that struck me, though, was that a lot of the interview was about the creative process in relation to intellectual property and plagiarism. They freely used terms like ‘free culture,’ ‘open source’ and ‘controlled culture,’ which I’ve never heard before on broadcast airwaves. I thought that was really cool.

In February, 2007, Harpers magazine published a piece by Lethem called “The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism“. It’s a really well written piece about the ways that ideas thrive throughout a culture and why the bloated modern copyright system is damaging our culture. From the article:

Visual, sound, and text collage—which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)—became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate—Igor Stravinsky’s music and Daniel Johnston’s, Francis Bacon’s paintings and Henry Darger’s, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens’s Bleak House to write The Bondwoman’s Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their “plagiarized” elements, like Richard Condon’s novels or Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons—it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

The coolest part of the article, though, is the end, where he lists all of the direct influences which have gone into creating the piece, and gives a brief description about how he came to use them. His influences range from an anonymous author on a dust jacket to Lawrence Lessig (Lethem reccomends ‘Free Culture’ on his own website) to Mary Shelley. It services as a fascinating example of the very process which the main article is about.

In the interview, he also talks about what he’s calling ‘The Promiscuous Materials Project.‘ Clearly inspired by Free and Open Source Software and the Free Culture movement, he’s offering up his stories and lyrics to potential filmmakers and musicians. By entering into a contract for a single dollar and some small stipulations, artists can build upon and reinterpret what he’s already created. For projects outside of the Project’s restrictions, artists can talk to him about figuring something out. He seems like an extremely chill guy who just wants to see more art come to fruition.

He doesn’t want to abolish copyright, but rather have it do it’s rightful job, which is (to quote the Constitution) to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” while protecting the artists from other people profiting off of their works without compensation. This is a very sensible viewpoint. I agree, but also think that all non-commercial use of any ‘Intellectual Property’ should be completely free of all restriction. It’s different when people are making money, but any other time, sharing is caring.

The podcast of the interview is available for download here, second paragraph down.

Now, I have to go and pack because I’m moving into my new house in Boston on Saturday!
Rich

(I hope I haven’t forgotten anything, WordPress fucked up and I had to do some scurried rewriting. Again.)

---

Stumble! | Save This Page! |