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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

the breakfast table
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from: James O'Donnell

Mass Production, Intellectual Property, and Trashy Novels

Posted Thursday, April 19, 2001, at 12:06 PM ET

Dick,

Thursday is going to be a little distracted, which is part of what real life is about, so don't fret if I'm a little slow. Your catalog of the inanities of the "news" was refreshing. I'm minded of the bit in the first chapter of Moby Dick where Ishmael imagines "Grand Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael" as a headline in minor type among screamers of the sort you're cataloging.

Isn't that kind of "news" what you get when copyright creates "intellectual property" and then mass production makes it possible to sell lots of it? I had a student once whose grandfather had been in the printing business in a British colony, printing for generations the official imperial languages: Arabic and English. But then came independence, and they began printing in the local language, the one that had hitherto had a literature, but only a manuscript and oral literature, and so had been confined to sensitive verse by sensitive versifiers. Suddenly they could produce "intellectual property" and mass-sell it: And so the first thing grandpa did was commission a series of trashy novels, hundreds of them, which my student had read with great pleasure in high school.

Aren't the newspapers just the nonfiction version of our trashy novels?

jo'd (Carrying Correlli Barnett around with him--that's my job for the week, and no mistake!)

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: James O'Donnell

Mass Production, Intellectual Property, and Trashy Novels

Posted Thursday, April 19, 2001, at 12:06 PM ET
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Richard Lanham spent his active academic career teaching and writing about medieval and Renaissance literature at UCLA, but now spends his retirement fiddling around with electronic text. He is the author of The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. James O'Donnell is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and vice provost of computing. He is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
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