Blogorrhea Junior

Blogging, Aggregators & Copyright

Copyright issues: they just never go away. Remember that new blog I started, the one called Dowsing? Boy, what a headache that turned into. Don't get me wrong: I love writing the blog. It's fun to have a personal journal again, a place where I can write merely for the purpose of expressing my thoughts—with the usual writer's eye to mining those posts for use elsewhere, which is why I went to the trouble of putting a clear copyright statement on it. This blog only has a Collective Commons copyright, stating that people are free to use the content, unaltered, for non-commercial purposes. I'm happy to have people subscribe to the feed, link, quote, or use the content for educational purposes. What I almost always protest is people just posting my content to draw traffic to their site, which may or may not have anything to do with book arts. Write your own damn content then. Don't steal from others.

So Dowsing, simply by virtue of its name, has ended up in the aggregate feed for a site called "Life Technology™. They sell pseudo-scientific, New Agey crap like Tesla oscillation fields, alchemical compounds, and Atlantean crystals (!! No, seriously!). So it's rather ironic that they're using my content on their site, since what Dowsing is all about is freedom from bad science and superstition. I've got hardly any hits on Dowsing, which I really don't care about in that sense. People will find it and read it if they're interested. It's as much for me as it is a public endeavor. So when I found Life Technology™'s URL in my stats, I was curious, and then I was pissed off.  But I'll let you read the exchange; here's what I wrote to them yesterday:

I notice that the content on your site is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright act. Guess what? So is mine. Please stop lifting content from my blog, Dowsing (http://leekottner.typepad.com/dowsing/), to use on your website as its purpose is antithetical to everything on your site. You have no less than a dozen posts from my blog on your dowsing page (http://www.lifetechnology.org/dowsing.php). Please remove them now or I will be filing a complaint with your ISP and website host.

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

And here's the nice little note I got in return this morning:

dear lee,
our news headlines at www.lifetechnology.org/dowsing.php are used according to fair use provisions and are intended to direct people to relevant sites.

you can read more about the fair use policy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

we have not published your articles, only headings with links to your articles at your own blog.

if we were breaking copyright provisions as you claim then most sites on the web would also be breaking the rules but that is not the case.

this law has been tested in court many times and rulings have universally been in the favour of the blogger.

thank you
kirsty

Are you laughing yet? I was. Wikipedia, huh? Here's my reply:

First of all, Kirsty, this is a very flimsy and erroneous argument, and you have picked the wrong person to use it on. I've written a series of posts on copyright for artists on another blog, so I'm fairly well educated about it. Find yourself a better source than Wikipedia. Try the U.S. Government copyright office instead.

As one of the intellectual property lawyers I spoke to said, "fair use only earns you the right to go to court." Fair use is in the eye of the copyright holder, who is much more likely to be favored in a court case than the person in violation; there is no hard and fast rule about proportion or magic number of words that the user may interpret for their own purposes. You are not using just the "headlines" from my posts; you are using much of the introductory paragraph. The feed from yesterday's post (7/02 "It's Just That Simple") uses almost the entire post, since it was a short written introductory paragraph with a video attached. The fact that you have selections from more than half of my posts would probably count against you too. I've become a major source for that particular feed, simply because my blog is called "Dowsing." As of this date, there are only 30 posts on my blog. 13 of those posts appear in some form on your page. That's a high proportion of content.

 

Fair use usually holds up best in court when it is used for educational purposes, in a classroom, or by artists. Your site is clearly primarily a commercial endeavor, not a news and information aggregator, and you are using my content to draw commercial traffic to your commercial site. Either you offer me a fee for the use of my content in this way, since you are clearly using it in a commercial manner, or you are in violation of my copyright, which states that my content cannot be used for commercial purposes unless I agree to it. I have not agreed, so you're in violation.

 

If you'd like a clear run-down on "fair use" you can find it here, at the U.S. Government copyright office site: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html. It clearly states that commercial use has less protection than non-profit or educational uses. It also clearly states that the safest course is always to get permission, which you have not done. Here are some of the uses which have generally been considered "Fair use" in the past.

 

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use:

quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.

 

None of these fit your case. In your reply, you state: "this law has been tested in court many times and rulings have universally been in the favour of the blogger." Guess what? You're not the blogger here. I am. You are the aggregator. The Associated Press has recently sued a news aggregator over just this issue. You can read about it here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071010-associated-press-sues-news-aggregator-for-licensing-failure.html

Secondly my site is not a "news" site nor is it relevant to your content; it is not about the paranormal, or dowsing, and is in fact, in part about real science, not the fake kind you're selling to gullible seekers. Now, if you'd like to see a totally scientific debunking about every one of your products appear in that "news" feed from my site, I'll be happy to oblige. It happens to fit my subject matter pretty tidily. I also happen to know a couple of well-respected science writers (and physicists) who'd be happy to pitch in, I'm sure.

Section 1204 sets out a hefty penalty for copyright infringement: 

§ 1204. Criminal offenses and penalties

(a) GENERAL  Any person who violates section 1201 or 1202 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain

(1) shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and

(2) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense.

I went to the trouble of clearly marking this site as copyrighted because I intend to use some of the posts in a non-fiction book. Your publication of them without my consent and without a fee injures me as an author and I think a court would side with me on this. Do you really want to risk a half-million dollar fine on this? And that's not counting the $100,000 for each infringement, i.e, each separate use of one of my posts. That's well over a million dollars in fines should it reach the maximum. Not to mention jail time.

Care to risk it?

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

Oddly enough, within an hour of receiving this, the feed from the news pages disappeared from their site. I suspect there is some serious editing of the spider going on.

UPDATE: Then the feed came back, and I began plotting with Jen to do the debunking posts, but this morning, I got a little note from their "legal counsel":

Dear Lee,

Thank you for your bringing your DMCA related concerns to our attention.

 

Life Technology acts as a news aggregator to provide news stories for the purpose of disemmination [sic] of news in categories that are relevant to our website. Dowsing is one such area that we are involved in. You will find many bona fide articles about dowsing at our website and blog. Despite what you seem to believe, our news stories are offered for educational purposes.

 

We are not guilty of publishing your work for our commercial gain nor have we acted in bad faith.

 

From a legal perspective, an infringement case would be very weak. There is strong argument for a fair use defense here. The brief exerpts [sic] of your work posted by ourselves are not stifling demand for your work. We are actually creating demand, not decreasing demand by providing links to the original work. Further, posting excerpts of the articles and linking to the original facilitates and invites critical discussion of the content, one of the primary reasons for the fair use defense.

 

You could not use the argument that we are diminishing the value of your work by disseminating copyrighted work prior to the publication of a book if you are publishing these exerpts into the public domain yourself.

 

Links are the currency of the internet. Instead of harassing bloggers etc., you should be praising them for bringing people to your content. It's a very poor business decision to ask people not to facilitate access to your product.

 

We are aware of the recent filing where Associated Press is suing a news aggregator on the same grounds. We feel that this even marks an unfortunate event in the history of the internet and free speech.

 

We have temporarily removed the offending page dowsing.php pending the outcome of The Associated Press versus Moreover technologies lawsuit and further clarification of DMCA law.

 

Thank you.

Joshua Silverberg, Legal Counsel Life Technology

Here's my reply:

Dear Joshua,

You've got an interesting interpretation of "public domain" if you think that anything on the internet is in it and thus fair game. Despite how "educational" a service you think your links provide, there is no escaping the fact that LifeTechnology is a commercial site selling goods. Your "news" feeds are merely a service; they are part of your advertising strategy, one I've employed myself in designing websites. Calling yourselves "bloggers" is disingenous and untrue. When my site provides a large proportion of your content for one of those feeds, you should be paying to use my material. I don't work for free. The harm is not in the linking, it's in the amount of material used, and the fact that my content is thus associated with a non-scientific site which lessens the value of my work. But I'll keep in mind the "increasing critical discussion" part if you start posting my material again. You won't mind me debunking the products because that will be educational. Some of my real scientific blogging friends were very excited about the prospect.

The upshot is is that you've removed the feed, and I'm happy with that.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

I'm not normally in favor of bullying people with the DMCA. Big corporations have made a bad habit of using it to intimidate perfectly legal uses of their content, so they can control all the money. I was happy to see The Naked Cowboy win the right to sue M&M Mars for misuse of his image for that reason. As a teacher, I'm all for fair use. But as a writer, I'm also all for being paid for your work and for having it appear only where you want it to. There's a thin and badly defined line between fair use and exploitation.

In this case, there's also the issue of guilt by association. As a writer, I do not want to be associated with any entity that sells the kind of pseudo-scientific crap this site sells. This is a list of their other "news" feeds, most of which I have a lot of objections to:

Kabbalah Radionics Magick Radiesthesia Homeopathy Alternative Health Mercola Jeff Sutherland PRWEB NLP Hypnosis Orgone Orgonite Rife Psychotronics Psionics Illuminati Alchemy Ormus Free Energy Alternative Science Spirituality Huna Metaphysics Occult Witchcraft Health Spirit Conspiracy Herbal Medicine Dowsing Healing Seduction Rosicrucian Paranormal Philosophy Technology Science Paganism Wicca Time Travel Feng Shui Atlantis UFO Scientology Zappers Cloudbusters Nikola Tesla Grimoires Chemtrails Manifesting Yoga Astrology Psychic Powers Xtrememind Forum

I hate to see yoga, spirituality, metaphysics, health, philosophy, technology, science, and Nikola Tesla lumped in with Atlantis, UFOs, Scientology, Orgone, Alchemy, and the Illuminati. Some of these things are not like the others.  I  suspect it was at least as much the threat of debunking as it was the legal talk that led to the sudden demise of the news feed. People have a right to believe whatever they like, but they also have a right not to be forced to associate or have their work associated with causes or ideas they don't condone. And control of your own intellectual work trumps, every time, the notion that information wants to be free.

[Cross posted at Dowsing]

In Dreams Begin . . . Mashups

I remarked earlier that I'm a vivid dreamer, and a lot of my story ideas come from dreams. Like most people, my most lucid ones, the ones I remember most often, are the ones I have in the morning, right before I wake up. I had a doozy this morning, and thank God I had the luxury of staying in bed to follow where it led. If you stick with them and think them out, there's almost always the kernel of a story in them or, if you're lucky, the whole magilla. That's what I got today.

One of the fun things about literally dreaming up story ideas is realizing in retrospect where all the elements have come from. One character (who was never on-stage in the dream, just implied) is patterned after a friend of a friend whom I've only heard described (in lengthy detail). One character is a guy I know from a former job. One character is a composite of several women I've worked with. The settings are every starving artist den of iniquity I've ever been in (or lived in myself) and Lew's & Jim's amazing library I saw at Christmas up in Maine. Combined with these real elements are all the archetypes of characters and all the myths I've ever read about and stored away. I love the way dreams play Mixmaster with everything you take in when you're conscious and then spit out something new with it in. It's the original form of mashups. Keep you posted on how this turns out. I'm kinda excited about it. But then, I always am, at first. It's the nose to the grindstone that gets it finished, though.

Conspiracy Theory: The NYT Book Review Version

I don't know why I keep reading the NYTimes Book Review with its crappy record of ignoring women's writing (when it's not outright belittling it). I guess I keep hoping that, magically, one day that will change. Then I remind myself that one of the definitions of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who feels this way about the male literary world though. One of my favorite book blogs, Fade Theory, has a link to an interview with Spanish author Lucia Etxebarria in cafebabel. (I haven't read any of her books as they're currently only available in her native Spanish and in French translations), Etxebarria has been a "journalist, translator, script-writer and has worked in advertising" in addition to writing novels and non-fiction books about pop culture. About male writers, she says,

‘Male artists are artists, female artists are women. That’s the way things work, and they have always been this way. Literature is an even more macho art than others. There’s a border between sentimental literature and virile literature, which should be kept in mind. Male writers are very embedded into their virility, and it’s a threat if we women sell more books than them.’ The former professor at the University of Aberdeen is jokingly blunt. ‘My books sell well and the best part is that I’m blunt, so people categorise me as a lesbian, or in the best case, as an emasculator.’

If it's a given that women writers ≠ artists, and I think it's safe to say that's true, then in that light, you can see the Times's exclusion of women as part of a conspiracy to erase our words. This is especially true with their high toned and highbrow attitude, though they've now condescended to review (gasp!) mass market fiction (and funny how much of that is written by women!), because in trade fiction, women dominate and on the non-fiction best seller list, the proportion of women to men is almost even, too. And yet, this week's perfidy reviews in the Book Review (Sunday, May 25, 2008): books by men: 11/13. 12/13 if you count the one that's co-authored with a woman, even though her name comes first.

Some things never change. But it's good to have somebody say it out loud.

No Longer a Michigander or, American English

Well, it looks like my going-on-25-years in New York City has finally eradicated my Midwestern accent, or so one of those online tests says. I am now not from anywhere. I am the woman without a region, a citizen at large. My mother always insisted that while my dad spoke unadulterated Pittsburghese with an associated creole of Kottnerisms, what she spoke was "American English," the equivalent of BBC English. Hawgwash. Newscaster English, especially in Britain (though here too) is completely artificial and unregional purposefully, to make us all seem more homogeneous and heterogeneous than we are.

I've been thinking about language, especially spoken language, quite a lot again since I started tutoring, since spoken language plays such a large role in how well one writes. I tell some of my students to read their papers aloud to themselves and they will hear where commas go, where periods belong. This only works with some of them, though, either because they come to English as a second language and the rhythms of their first one are different and still overlay their second language, or because their reading skills are so poor that they read word by word rather than phrase by phrase. So the rule I learned—that you insert a comma where you take a breath or where you naturally pause—doesn't work for them. Then we have to fall back on rules and examples, which, frankly, I hate.

I hate it because it's an artifical way to learn a language, any language, even your own. Nobody makes conscious grammatical decisions, when speaking, about what tenses to use, or is that noun plural or singular so what should the verb be? Being able to hear what sounds correct in grammar is more important, I think, than being able to explain or even understand why. Accept that these are the agreed-upon, arbitrary rules of a language, and then learn the way it sounds. Grammar is often like gravity: it just is. Nobody knows why it's this way, but when the rules were codified (thanks, Sam Johnson) somebody often just decided it sound better this way. Let me repeat that: Somebody decided it sounded better this way. As with history, the winners write the stories, and the educated elite codified the "correct" language. It's another manifestation and tool of class and regional snobbery.

I think fondly of the early anarchy of English spelling and sentence structure around Caxton's time. It must have made reading harder, but then, so few people did it. But it made the language rich: rich in accents, in words, in metaphors and images. The other day, one of my students accidentally made an absolutely beautiful, metaphoric line by using a word that sounded very similar to the one she really needed. I wanted to steal it from her, it was so gorgeous. But she's a poet too, and I restrained myself, after pointing it out to her. I hope she squirrels it away for later use. Happy accidents like that don't happen very often.

Or maybe they do, if you're listening for them. I've been riding the bus back and forth to CNR since it's a straight shot down Westchester Ave. from my place. A lot of kids of all ages ride the bus, too, and if you're a language junkie, kids are where the verbal mescalin and speedballs are. The neologisms alone, some as ephemeral as mayflies, are worth putting up with the hormonal teenage noise. But it's the little kids who come up with the metaphoric gems. One little boy, who insisted on sitting in his seat completely upside down, regaled his mother with a litany of metaphors so stunning (and so exasperating and tiring to her, poor bun) that I had to get out my notebook to write some of them down. Here's a couple: The sky is a sweater. The earth is a gun. These followed by "Mommy, I'm too much." And he was. If only he knew how he was too much. It was a spoken word jazz improv and the kid was freebasing language.

That kind of language is infectious (unless you're a tired mom with a hyperactive kid). And you only hear it if you listen carefully to everyday life. The sanitized language of TV doesn' t have it. And when I say sanitized, I mean it. Think we don't have censorship in this country? Try saying fuck—a word so overused it has all but completely lost its shock value—on network TV. There are few regional accents, not much slang, and no poetry. Listening to American and British newscasters, you'd think we were all one. Not hardly. Even Midwesterners are not all one.

I've forgotten how strong that Michigan/Ohio/Indiana/Wisconsin accent can be; only a visit from my cousins recently reminded me. Their round vowels kept blinking "not from here." Stay in one place long enough, no matter how different from your own, and the language starts to rub off on you. Certainly the local lingo does. I now call carbonated soft drinks "soda" instead of "pop" while I'm standing "on" line instead of "in" line. (Perhaps this is why New Yorker's queue up so badly while waiting for the bus: nobody can find the invisible line we're supposed to be standing on.) I have also learned to speak Starbuckian while here, though not through any real effort, just out of repetition and necessity. The natives don't understand you otherwise. And apparently, I have lost my accent, such as it was.

My English friend Helen, who lived in the States for a long time while pursuing a doctorate, lost a great deal of her plummy accent while she was over here and sounded almost American. Having been back home for a good 20 years now, though, her clipped, Oxbridgian accent is thick enough to spread on a muffin. And her grammar is far more precise and exacting (and British) than mine will ever be (for which I am secretly grateful).

But knowing how a language sounds can save you more than grammar grief. It teaches you to spell. One of the most useful things I ever learned, besides how to diagram sentences, was phonics, and how to break words up into syllables. If you know the sounds of the phonemes, what a morpheme is, and where to break a syllable, you're pretty much set.

Or so you'd think. Maybe I'm just a word junkie. There was a really fascinating discussion on my flist at LJ (friends locked, so I can't give you the link) where I contributed something about intuitive learning. Someone replied that although she read a lot, this had never worked her. Which, of course, it doesn't, and I'm just extrapolating my experience onto others. Bad me, no biscuit. I think it's being a word junkie that made me more attuned to how language works, both in writing and spoken forms. I've always loved the sound of words. Some of them almost have texture to me, or color or flavor. I have a definite preference for what I think of as "hard" consonants, especially K and G and T, and though I like the word fricative as a word the sounds defined as such don't do much for me. I like knowing the etymology of words, and knowing what their roots mean in the language we stole them from (usually Greek or Latin), which makes it easier to parse out the meaning of similar words, e.g. photon, photography, and photosynthesis all have to do with light. But I don't think learning to listen or to read well hurts either.

Form & Substance (Oh, and New Poems)

Prompted by a request from Jen over at Cocktail Party Physics, I've updated the poetry page over at my site. She asked to use an old poem, "On the Fringes, Falling Up" (from 1985! Yikes!) in one of her posts. I've put a copy of the poem up, and added a couple of new ones. It's instructive and sometimes cringe-making to go back to old work, but I'm not too horribly ashamed of this one. And its images of Tibet dovetail nicely with the new one from this year called "Wooden Buddha, Stone Buddha, Buddha Nature." Hmm, maybe there's a theme . . . *wink*

As I think I've mentioned earlier, I haven't been writing a lot of original stuff lately (aside from mad blogging), being involved in learning a new art form, kicking my freelance business into higher gear, and trying to take a breather from the Protestant Work Ethic of wage slavery. But for the last several years, I have been writing a lot of fanfic, which I can almost do in my sleep. I enjoy it because I know the characters so well that I can concentrate mostly on the plot structure and the language. I'm very slowly teaching myself to write short stories, which is a really hard format for me. I like big, sprawly books with big, sprawly ideas, and I've always been more of a Big Picture Person than a Detailer, at least as far as reading and scholarship go. So I find long fiction much easier to write than I do short fiction. Even my fanfic has become a big picture: it's a huge set of interconnected stories along one story arc. Some of them are brief moments, some of them are longer action-adventure stories or drama. As I write more of them, I'm trying to keep them all to 20 pages or under, which should tell you something about how long-winded I am.

But my poems tend to be little tiny moments or single images, extrapolated outward, or, lately, extrapolated inward (er, the opposite of extrapolate is not interpolate; what is it?), and are seldom longer than a page. I've been reading a lot of haiku recently, especially a really lovely little book called The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu (that I picked up in my foray to Kinokunya) and writing very compact 3-line poems under the collective title "In This Moment." They're not haiku or any other formal verse form, but I've confined myself to three short lines, with as many in a set as necessary to catch the moments in a given period of time. For instance, I wrote a set of 12 3-liners in the three hours between tutoring students one afternoon and on the bus to and from it, another set of 17 while I was proctoring a 4-hour exam, and another set of 4 (far less successful) one afternoon from 3-4 at home.

It's an interesting exercise, especially for someone like me, who has a tendency to go on and on. (I'm sure you've noticed that.) It makes me pare everything down to the absolute essentials of what I want to say, and work harder to craft the image I'm reaching for. I can't be sloppy or vague; I have to find exactly the right word, and right way of saying it. And really, that's what writing's all about.

White Rabbit Syndrome

As you've no doubt noticed, the book arts posts have been pretty slim around here of late. I promise to change that, soon. I wrote most of April's posts a month ahead of time, but have been doing May's very piece-meal, which means I've been writing what I know for the last month, the result of which is you get a lot of posts about writing, not so many about book arts.

The truth is, the book arts posts, though short, take a lot of time to research, if I want to make them interesting and substantive and not just repeat what everyone else is posting. So it involves combing through both numerous Google alerts, and my ever-growing list of blogs, something that can easily take most of the day, then writing the artist for permission to use an image, and learning more about them. This weekend (Memorial Day here in the States) I plan to spend some time in the evenings catching up on my reading and flagging stuff to write about. I'm equally backed up on my emails. But in addition, I have readings for my upcoming class to plan and syllabi to finish, and, and, and . . .

You get the idea.

This makes me feel a bit like Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit: "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" Fortunately, most of the book arts stuff I tend to write about isn't time sensitive. I just have to sound like I know what I'm talking about. You know, it's said that the best way to know something is to have to teach it, and it's true. I'm continually getting a good education in book arts and techniques by writing about it here.

"So remember what the Dormouse said: 'Feed your head! Feed your head!'"

Writing Prompts

Though I'm not a huge fan of McSweeneys (too self-conscious in an aren't-we-clever way, for my taste), but I love this send-up of the writing prompt technique. I'm not a big fan of writing prompts either, except as a way of jump-starting your writing to go on to something else. That old dictum about writing what you know (which is really a dictum for beginning writers) applies in this case. It's difficult, if not impossible, to write an emotionally honest, psychologically real story from someone else's ideas. It may, as you're writing it, turn into something emotionally honest and psychologically real, but chances are that if it does, you've left the original storyline somewhere in the dust. I know a lot of people use writing prompts, but I've seldom seen a good story come out of one that isn't just a collection of random words, or a single noun or verb, without the ideas.

Which is what this parody is all about. I mean, what would you do with a prompt like this:

A wasp called the tarantula hawk reproduces by paralyzing tarantulas and laying its eggs into their bodies. When the larvae hatch, they devour the still living spider from the inside out. Isn't that fucked up? Write a short story about how fucked up that is.

Do I really want to know? Probably not. Neither does anyone else. Now, using that fact as a metaphor . . . hmmm, you could go some interesting, if nasty, places with that.

This is not to say that prompts aren't useful or a good thing. Natalie Goldberg, author of my favorite and one of the most useful books ever written about writing, suggests keeping a list of things to write about. Just a list of one or two words or short phrases. But the more stripped down, the better. For example, there are a couple of writers groups on LiveJournal who post weekly prompts for flash fiction. These consist of four random words and the rule that you must write the piece within an 8-minute time frame. I keep thinking this would be an excellent exercise for me, mostly because it scares me to death. The little writer in my head runs around in freaked-out circles with her hands thrown in the air yelling, Are you crazy? I can't write a whole story in 8 minutes! I can't even write a coherent paragraph in 8 minutes! which is an exaggeration (she's such a drama queen!).

What I can't do is think of a storyline that I could resolve in a mere 8 minutes. You know that 6-word Hemingway story: "For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn."? Brilliant, huh? Concise, poignant, dramatic. Six words. To my brain, that is merely a fragment from which to start. I've got a whole story built around that about a miscarriage that completely destroys a marriage. Hemingway's six words are just the opening lines, the ad in the paper that sets the already-inevitable dissolution in motion. In eight minutes? Not bloody likely. Think of all the character development!

That's my downfall (or my strong suit, depending on how you look at it). I find people endlessly fascinating, and the ways they justify their lives and actions by turns amusing, appalling, and confusing. I love trying to get inside their heads and seeing how the world looks to them. This does not make for short fiction, as a rule.

I guess it doesn't really matter. Novels are easier to sell than short story collections, as a rule, though they've both been trumped by "memoir." It just seems funny that I work most comfortably at both ends of the spectrum: novels and poetry, and that I'm so completely inept at the middle ground. I guess this makes me a literary extremist.

Now, tarantula hawk wasp: poem or novel?

Shakespeare's Birthday: Publishing in the New Frontier

First, happy birthday to the Bard of Avon (1564-1616), an extremely talented man ripped off by his own publisher. I've mentioned elsewhere that, in his lifetime, Shakespeare didn't own the rights to his own sonnets and the printer who published him put out a collection of his work (that also included poems only attributed to him; talk about diluting the brand!) without paying him a farthing. (Copyright wouldn't be developed for nearly another 100 years.) Printing presses in Europe were only around 100 years old (Gutenberg, the European inventor, died in 1468) and just coming into wide use at this time, so books were still something of a luxury item. The text was laboriously hand set, the signatures hand-cut and hand-sewn and hand-bound, so there was still a lot of labor involved in producing multiples, which made them somewhat pricey. The beauty of poetry is that it's short and needn't be more than a single signature. It can also be pamphlet-bound which makes it far less work than a leather-bound book and a quick money-maker.

I won't go into the whole history of printing and publishing here, but suffice to say, it's going in some interesting directions now. Print On Demand (POD) publishing has become quite popular and distribution over the net has made advertising far cheaper and wider than ever before possible. In true conglomerate fashion, Amazon, which is now the world's largest bookseller, is trying to horn in on the action of PODs and corner the market. It recently bought BookSurge, a POD company, and is now telling other POD publishers that it must use BookSurge's facilities or forgo distribution by Amazon. This is very bad news for places like Lulu and Lightning Source. From the Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon's Web site.

Amazon "doesn't consider this an ultimatum," according to one of its spokespersons, but when you've cornered 15% of the book distribution market, and most of the online market, what else can you call it? Okay, blackmail, maybe. Extortion? Oh, I know. Monopoly!

In the spirit of independent publishing and World Book Day, Oached Pish has gathered a list of links to independent publishers in honor of the Bard's birthday. You'll see my own Maelstrom House listed there, though I haven't got much stock yet, and everything else from manga to poetry.

And if you're a poet thinking about DIYing, it's worth checking out the DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative for links and news.

V-Day, Ten Years On ({})

It's also Women's History Month, a cause even nearer and dearer to my heart than poetry. This year, V-Day is the tenth anniversary of the first performance of Eve Ensler's ground-breaking "The Vagina Monologues," which is now performed all over the world as a fundraiser for local anti-violence groups, crisis centers, shelters and more. Here are a couple of sobering reasons why, from Feminist.com:

• In the National Violence Against Women Survey, approximately 25% of women and 8% of men said they were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date in their lifetimes. The survey estimates that more than 300,000 intimate partner rapes occur each year against women 18 and older.
• One out of every six American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. (Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey, National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1998)
• Factoring in unreported rapes, about 5% - one out of twenty - of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. 19 out of 20 will walk free. (Probability statistics based on US Department of Justice Statistics)

I've been lucky, but many of my friends have not. One was raped in childhood, another gang-raped in college (and still suffers Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from it), a third was date-raped as adult and another as a college student, another was abused by her live-in boyfriend and had to flee with nothing but the clothes on her back, another fought off her attacker when she was traveling abroad by herself. My mother was sexually abused by one of her own brothers. That's seven women already, just in a group of, oh, maybe 30 friends. Not everyone tells and not everyone reports it to the authorities, so I wouldn't be surprised if this were merely the tip of the iceberg among my wide circle of friends. Saddened, but not surprised.

If you've been or are being abused, sexually or physically or emotionally, tell someone. Tell a co-worker, tell your boss, tell the HR person at work, tell a cop, tell your best friend, tell your health-care provider, tell your minister or pastor or priest or the person who sings next to you in the choir. If none of those work for you, call here, for free:

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233

Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN): (800) 656-HOPE
    24 Hour Confidential Rape Hotline.

National Victim Center: 800-FYI-CALL (394-2255)
    Operating 8:30AM-5:30PM EST, the NVC hotline helps locate assistance in your community
    if you have been the victim of a violent crime.

You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your abuser does.

When the Democratic campaign first turned into a race between Obama and Clinton, I remarked to a friend that we're likely to have a black president before we'll have a woman president. Knowing what a feminist I am, she seemed shocked. But in this country, where 19 out of 20 rapists go free—in part from underreporting, in part from lack of convictions and outrageous sentences—it's still okay to yell "iron my shirts!" to the woman, but not to the male descendant of slaves. We are half the population of this world, and nowhere, not even in the U.S., are woman truly valued for anything but their cunts or protected equally under the law. We are still taught to be ashamed of our bodies, taught that our sexuality is shameful, taught that we are never good enough the way we are. Or, as NOW's Women's Rights Manifesto puts it:

Because woman's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we're the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos and if we don't we're frigid and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and if we don't we're unnatural and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and...for lots and lots of other reasons . . .

We are part of the women's liberation movement.

This is why V-Day is so important and Women's History Month is so important. Speaking out together gives other women courage and strength and makes us realize we're not alone. Support your sisters. There have already been several performance of "The Vagina Monologues" in the city this year. If you missed them, Baruch College is holding a benefit performance on March 26 at 7 PM here:

55 Lexington Ave (@25th street)
New York New York 10010
Phone: 917-592-4107
Enter the main college building and ask for the Engelman Recital Hall, which will be to your right, 2 flights down by elevator. Doors open at 6:45PM. You must purchase tickets ahead of time.

Go here to find a performance near you. Take your daughter, your mother, your sister. More importantly, take your husband, your son, your brother, your father, and start a dialogue. It might help stop future violence against women.

Poetry for Book Artists and Everyone Else

You know where to find it in the bookstore, but where can you find it on the web? Just in case you didn't know this (and where have you been? Under a rock somewhere?) there are loads of resources on the web for reading, publishing, even teaching poetry. There are e-zines galore, associations, graduate programs, small presses, and plenty of individual poets. The web has opened up a world of poetry for everyone. It's everywhere, in many guises and styles. And it's free! (Which is why poets mostly have other jobs; not that I think that's a bad thing.)

And take note all you book artists: these are people you'll want to hook up with to find great material to use in your books. It's not like it's a new idea; the Center for Book Arts sponsors an annual poetry chapbook contest (PDF) to give their letterpress and book arts students material to work with. In the class I took a couple of years ago, we made a broadsheet of a gorgeous poem by Gregory Pardlo that was part of a collection that later won awards. They also have a broadsides reading series. Most of the poets you'll find on the web would be very excited to work with you. Don't be shy.

Associations:

These are some of the mainstream poetry associations, but they all have links to others, and you can find just about any kind of poetry you like somewhere, just by starting here.

• The Academy of American Poets
• The Poetry Society of America not to be confused with:
• The Poetry Society of the UK. I guess they thought of it first, so we had to distinguish ourselves.
• United Poets on the West Coast and
• Poets West in the Pacific Northwest
• And if you're in New York, there's Poets House, with its vast collection of poetry books and public reading room.

Important Venues/"Schools"

I use the term "schools" very loosely. These aren't MFA programs; they're more like the School of Hard Knocks Poetics, and some amazing people have come out of them. I know the ones in New York best, because well, that's where I live. Feel free to add others in the comments.

• St. Mark's Poetry Project
• Nuyorican Poet's Cafe
• Bowery Poetry Club
• Cowboy Poetry at the Bar-D Ranch
• Gathering of the Tribes

Individual Poets (some of my personal local favorites):

• Christine Hamm has a blog called this is all your fault. She posts poems and her schedule for readings there. If you're in NYC, go look her up at one of them, especially the Poetry Brothel, and don't miss her poems.
• Cheryl B's The B-List, with news about her regular Poetry vs. Comedy gigs at the Bowery Poetry Club and elsewhere, and a fantastic set of links to other poets, writers, writing sites, zines, etc.
• Bob Holman, proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, poet, and poem pimp extraordinaire.
• Angelo Verga, one of my favorite Bronx poets.
• LivePoets.com has footage from a number of slams and spoken word performances.
• And if you want to know more about other poets, living and dead, and their poems, you can look them up at Poetry.org.

Just for fun (with lots of pop-ups, so be forewarned) the haiku generator. There, that should get you started.