Chaucer

11 December 2010

A nice little piece on the joys of Chaucer. One quibble is that both this piece and the Economist piece that points to it perpetuate the myth that Chaucer was “among the first” to write literature in English. That’s total crap. There’s a continuous tradition of English-language poetry going back to the seventh century. But the piece is dead on target with its assessment of why Chaucer is so fun to read.

If you’re tempted to take a dip into The Canterbury Tales, there is no need to read them in the traditional order of the Ellesmere manuscript. That order starts you off with The Knight’s Tale, which is a great story, but really long and off-putting to those still trying to get their eye into the Middle English. I would also recommend that you skip The Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale, at least at first. These two bawdy tales are a lot of fun, but they’re the ones that everyone reads. If you only read one of the tales, it should The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. A story where you have chickens alluding to Homer and debating Scholastic doctrines of free will is really funny. The tale telescopes all of The Canterbury Tales into this single story. Also not to be missed is The Tale of Sir Thopas. This often ignored tale is a wondrous parody of bad, Arthurian poetry. The tale is told by the character of Chaucer the pilgrim—so the poet has created a character of himself who spouts gloriously bad poetry, whom the Host critiques with, “thy drasty ryming is nat worth a tord!” It takes someone as brilliant as Chaucer to write bad poetry that is this good.

(Hat tip: The Economist’s “Johnson" blog.

Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2010

4 December 2010

Again, how can you have an award for a year that hasn’t ended yet? But the Literary Review’s annual award for Bad Sex in Fiction this year goes to Rowan Somerville for his novel The Shape of Her, which included such gems as:

Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.

Laura Miller over at Slate has a nice article on why the Literary Review’s award isn’t such a hot idea. (Other than being premature.)

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Amazon.com as Censor?

4 December 2010

Onnesha Roychoudhuri has an article in this month’s Boston Review on the power that Amazon and other large retailers wield over the publishing industry. Because a handful of large retail outlets (Amazon, Google, Border’s, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, and Target) sell a large proportion of the books in the United States, they have the potential to determine what books get read. And with Amazon leading the e-book market, its power is only growing. Amazon has not been shy about using this power, as Roychoudhuri, points out to essentially blackmail publishers into giving them bigger discounts and delisting books from publishers that do not give in to their demands.

And it’s not only books. Amazon also hosts web sites. It recently pulled the plug on the Wikileaks web pages that were hosted on Amazon’s servers.1 There are also indications that the firm removed gay and lesbian titles from its ranking schemes because of political pressure. (Amazon says it was a “glitch,” but never explained what happened.) Amazon’s history suggests that it is distinctly uninterested in freedom of information and puts its own profits above other concerns. Yes, companies like Amazon operate to make money and I don’t begrudge them that. But they also operate within a larger community and have responsibility for the communal welfare in addition to their responsibility to return a profit to shareholders. And in the long run, Amazon’s profits will be better served by a robust and vibrant information society than by one that is shuttered and channeled.

This is something to be very concerned about. Increasingly, the general public’s access to information is becoming funneled through a handful of media companies. We need to enforce a broader public sensibility that certain for-profit firms operate as something of a public trust, with responsibility for maintaining free flow of information.

Within the past few weeks, friends of mine have advocated that we demand Amazon remove a self-published e-book that advocated pedophilia from its “shelves” and that Apple remove an iTunes application from its store from an anti-gay political group.2 Now, the book on pedophilia appears to be a truly awful book, and I have no truck with Chuck Colson and his anti-gay group, but in both cases there is no evidence that either Amazon or Apple consciously decided to place these products in their store; people can automatically add their products to these stores provided they meet certain technical conditions. Should we really be trying to force Amazon and Apple to act as censors? But what happens when the political tables are turned. Amazon has deranked gay and lesbian titles in the past. Do we ask Amazon to delist Mein Kampf because it promotes antisemitism? What happens when Apple removes a MoveOn.org application from its iStore? There is a difference between protesting a corporation’s own political actions and protesting a corporation because it provides an media outlet that does not discriminate based on content, even if particular groups, even a vast majority, find that content objectionable.

Yes, companies have the right to not sell or provide outlets for material. It’s one thing for a store, small or large, with limited shelf space to limit the material it makes available or to focus on a particular market niche. But in the case of large media companies like Amazon and Apple, is this really a good idea? Isn’t it better to say they are a common carrier and all should have equal access to making their material available through these outlets? And when a bookstore grows so large that it can influence what books publishers actually produce, it takes on an obligation to carry all books, not just the ones that they get at deep discount.

1 The justification for the removal was that Wikileaks did not “own” the documents and there may have been concern that Amazon would be liable under espionage laws. But the decision in New York Times, Co. v. United States in the Pentagon Papers affair is pretty clear, unless the publisher plays a role in creating the leak the government can’t restrict publication of classified material. While the law is murky on whether Wikileaks as an organization is culpable under US espionage law, it is pretty clear that Amazon, in the role of ISP, is not. If the documents were copyrighted, Amazon would be obligated to pull them down, but US government documents cannot be copyrighted.

2 The iTunes application was free. Apple was making no money from it and had no stake in its success or failure. It was merely providing a media outlet like it does for all its application developers.

(Disclaimer: I am an Amazon Associate and make a modest amount of money (just enough to pay the operating costs of this site) through money generated by people clicking on links to books for sale at the store and through Google advertising.)

Legal Jargon: Same As It Ever Was

30 November 2010

As part of my learning medieval Latin, I’ve just started reading some legal depositions from thirteenth-century Venice. Now I’m used to Latin homiletics, hagiography, Biblical commentary, and poetry, but this was my first excursion into legal lingo. I was shocked at how modern it seemed. It could have come from a modern police blotter or out of the mouth of a police officer on the TV show Cops. Here’s an example from a deposition taken on 8 April 1290:

Florencius filius predicti Dominici, iuratus mandata domini potestatis et dicere veritatem et sacramento requisitus, dixit quod, die mercurii nunc elapso, ipse, cum uno alio qui vocatur Dainesius, laborabat audivit quemdam rumorem in curtivo dictarum dominarum; ad quem rumorem venit et vidit dictum Galvanum cum uno cultello a pane in manu euendo versus unam mulierem que est soror istius Florencii, ut dicit, et uxor ipsius Galvani. Quod cum videsset dictum Galvanum facientum insultum contra dictam suam sororem, ipse Florencius ivit versus dictum Galvanum et cepit ipsum, et ipse Galvanus ipsum Florencium et, sic tenendo se ad invicem, dictus Florencius percussit ipsum Galvanum cum pugno seu manu in faciem, taliter quod sanguis exivit. Interrogatus si aliqui alii precusserunt ipsum Galvanum, respondit non quod credat. De presentibus interrogatus, respondit quod plures fuerunt presentes, set non cognoscit eos. Aliud nescit.

Condempnatus in LX solidis et expensis curie. Solvit.

(Florencius, son of the aforementioned Dominicus, sworn as the mandates of the lord Podesta (civil magistrate) and to tell the truth and asked by oath, said that, on the Wednesday now passed, he, with one other named Dainesius, was working in the vineyard of the nuns of the aforesaid Saint Mary and, while they were working he heard certain shouting in the courtyard of the said nuns; he went to that shouting and he saw the aforesaid Galvanus with a bread knife in hand going toward a woman who is the sister of that Florencius, as he says, and the wife of that Galvanus. When he had seen the aforesaid Galvanus making an assault on his aforesaid sister, that Florencius went toward the aforesaid Galvanus and seized him, and that Galvanus seized that Florencius, thus holding each other, the aforesaid Florencius struck that Galvanus with his fist or hand in the face, such that blood discharged. Asked if some other struck that Galvanus, he responded that he believes not. Asked about the circumstances, he responded that many were present, but he did not know them. He knows nothing else.

Sentenced to sixty shillings and court expenses. He paid.)

I’m not the greatest at Latin, but this isn’t complex stuff, and it’s nearly a word-for-word translation. I haven’t massaged this at all to make it read like a modern deposition. Since our legal traditions are rooted in medieval Latin, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this legal mode of writing seems so normal to us some seven hundred years later. But I’ve never encountered anything this old that sounds so modern before.

(Edit: minor corrections to the translation)