Last year Jonathan Law, as part of “his occasional series on artists who have vanished into thin air,” had a fascinating Dabbler piece on a poet I (and very likely you) had never heard of, Rosemary Tonks. She had a brief, sparkling career half a century ago, publishing six novels and a handful of poems: “her first collection, Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms, came out in 1963 and a second, Iliad of Broken Sentences, in 1967. For once, the cliché about ‘slim volumes’ is entirely apt: the books contain Tonks’s complete poetical works – a total of 46 short poems.” The poems are remarkable; they don’t sound like any other English poetry, though they do sound like her main influences, the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Here’s a bit from “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas”:
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum
… the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs
And splashes you with acid … or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.
Then, “at some point in the mid-1970s Rosemary Tonks slipped out of that big house in Hampstead and to all intents and purposes vanished. She would never publish again and for many years the literary world had no idea if she was alive or dead.” Over the years readers kept discovering those few poems, and from the late ’90s on they started appearing in anthologies; apparently the 2002 Bloodaxe Books anthology Staying Alive: Real Poetry for Unreal Times won her quite a few fans. But hardly anyone knew much about her life until she died; I won’t spoil it for you, but after you’ve read Law’s piece you’ll want to read Neil Astley’s Guardian obituary, published last Friday. (I got these links from the MetaFilter post, which has more if you’re interested.) While she was alive she refused to allow any collections of her work to be published; hopefully now that will change. (And no, I don’t believe the wishes of dead authors should be respected; otherwise we’d have hardly any Virgil or Kafka.)
“Adult novels”; does that mean porn?
As soon as I read the above, I thought of Eliot, who is indeed mentioned in Law’s article. Then I thought of Ginsberg, or perhaps Ginsberg channelling Eliot. Or vice versa (do people channel their descendants, biological or spiritual?) Whitman. Sandburg. There are lots of analogues in English poetry, but it’s not news unless it’s “the best or the only or both”.
Looks like she had a hard time in the 1970s and just said the hell with it, and went to live a fairly ordinary, if unusually religious, life. That hardly makes her an Amelia Earhart.
Looks like she had a hard time in the 1970s and just said the hell with it, and went to live a fairly ordinary, if unusually religious, life. That hardly makes her an Amelia Earhart.
A comparison with historical linguists might be more apt.
If she refused to allow republication, how did a few of the poems appear in these best-selling anthologies in the last decade and a half? Was she inconsistent in how she responded to requests, or were some of the slim stack of poems governed by different contracts than others so that someone else had the right to decide? It doesn’t *sound* like there’s likely to be some huge cache of unpublished work, but who knows, and likewise who knows (did she have a will? are we to infer that she was childless from the obit’s mention of a marriage but silence as to children?) who will end up now with control of whatever she had not signed away control of.
> And no, I don’t believe the wishes of dead authors should be respected; otherwise we’d have hardly any Virgil or Kafka.
These days, when you wish to support your opinion without actually, y’know, supporting your opinion, the fashion is to use “because” with a noun phrase or adjective or verb. So I guess you meant to write:
> And no, I don’t believe the wishes of dead authors should be respected, because lame.
A collection is a book containing works all of which are by the same author. Refusing to authorize a collection is not the same as refusing to be anthologized, and the rights are separate: she may not have had the anthology rights.
a poet I (and very likely you) had never heard of, Rosemary Tonks
No, I hadn’t heard of her, but her great-uncle Tonks, at one time a surgeon who was later known and feared by students as the head of the Slade School of Fine Art (part of University College, London, and still my favourite art school). His own paintings seem pretty lame considering he was working at a time when Cubism, Fauvism and Futurism – one of his students was the Vorticist Percy Wyndham Lewis – were all emerging, but his work is also quite peculiar. His knowledge of surgical procedure meant he had a unique perspective as a WW1 war artist. You can see some of this work in Wikipedia.
These days, when you wish to support your opinion without actually, y’know, supporting your opinion, the fashion is to use “because” with a noun phrase or adjective or verb. So I guess you meant to write:
Except I did support my opinion, so I guess you just meant to shoehorn in a reference to the “because” fad.
I too immediately thought her poetry reminded me of Eliot.
Yes, Eliot’s probably the closest thing (along with some early Pound: “go! jangle their door-bells!”), but of course he and Pound were influenced by the same French symbolists.
One reason to hope her verse will be republished now that she’s dead is that it’s essentially unavailable now except in libraries. Amazon Marketplace has no copies for sale, ABE has no copy of Iliad of Broken Sentences, one copy of Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms priced at $1477.67 plus shipping. Even for a book whose condition is Fine in Near Fine dust jacket, with a dedication to a friend, that’s a little steep.
She reminds me of tens of thousands of other “poets” whose slim volumes lie unopened and unread for no other reason than they are not very good. “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas”; the affected title alone belies a strained amateurism.
I hate to say it, Hozho, but you’re losing your edge. The hot peppers have been used up, and all that remains is a faintly sour tang vaguely reminiscent of what was once a bracing contrarianism. Step up your game!
Yes, it lacks hózhǫ́ these days.
Hozho: Hat
“I won’t spoil it for you but obituary” is not entirely without bespoilment, if it comes to that, but I do like a slim volume of verse.
Also: I have been to Bournemouth, more than once. It is a place that inspires despair.
I’d like to know more about the history of the phrase “slim volume”.
The OED2 defines it as “a book of verse by a little-known poet (freq. mildly derogatory)”; the first quotation given, from The Daffodil Mystery by Edgar Wallace, is dated 1920. The ODO says “typically verse” and omits the parenthetical remark in both its AmE and BrE versions.
I’ve certainly heard “slim volume” used in a mildly derogatory fashion to describe books in other genres than poetry, including some books that were nonfiction. (An example of a popular psychology book come immediately to mind.)
Perhaps the negative associations of “slim volume” partly explain those of “slim-hipped” in the 60s.
“Both legs broken, pulp-skulled, jelly-hipped […]”
And that doesn’t sound to you like a whole lot of other contemporary poetry?
It’s a satire. At least I think it is. With Delany it’s hard to tell.
For me, “slim volume” will always be associated with 1066 and All That: “‘This slim volume…’ – The Bookworm”
one copy of Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms priced at $1477.67 plus shipping
It’s the shipping that really stings.
> Except I did support my opinion […]
But you didn’t. Your opinion was that people shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions you might disagree with, and your support was to list some such decisions . . .
LH: I don’t believe the wishes of dead authors should be respected; otherwise we’d have hardly any Virgil or Kafka
Ran, I fail to see how you can go from the first sentence to the huge generalization “people shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions you might disagree with”. And the second sentence is not a list of “decisions”, it lists “examples” of authors whose works were saved from destruction, in “support” of the personal “opinion” stated in the first sentence.
LH, I remember a well-known linguist (still alive) advising a group of younger ones to archive their unpublished work, field notes and the like, while they were still in the possession of their normal faculties, lest “in their dotage” later they should decide to burn or otherwise destroy them all instead of leaving them for the benefit of future scholars. Depression or (heaven forbid) dementia often leads people to making decisions which they would not have made in their fully functional state.
But you didn’t. Your opinion was that people shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions you might disagree with, and your support was to list some such decisions . . .
Don’t be ridiculous. I supported my opinion with a reference to major works that we would not have if the wishes of the authors had been respected; the assumption was that anyone who cares about culture would accept that as a good reason. I don’t know whether you don’t care about culture or are just being obnoxious, but in either case your disagreement with my supporting argument does not mean it doesn’t exist.
I do care about culture, but I also care about humans. (I wouldn’t have thought that those beliefs were at odds, but apparently they can be!) Just because an author’s work could have cultural value, that doesn’t instantly mean the author should have no say in whether and how it is made public.
I remember reading, a few years ago, some criticism of antidepressants, arguing that certain great artists might not have created their works if their depression had been properly treated. (Naturally the critic did not use the phrase “properly treated”.) And I have to ask — what gives us the right to decide that? If a human would benefit from antidepressants, we don’t have the right to deny their humanity on the basis that they’re also an artist.
If someone wills their work to destruction, we shouldn’t say “I don’t believe that artists deserve that choice. I can decide better than them.”
(Full disclosure: I’m writing this in part because you’ve posted similar views in the past. Nabokov had a partially-finished novel, and you felt that his son (IIRC) should disregard his father’s wish that it be destroyed. In that case you were much more clearly wrong, since Nabokov obviously had a right to determine the disposition of his unpublished work, and a right to trust his son to honor his wishes. The current case is admittedly rather different, since Tonks’ work is already public.)
Just because an author’s work could have cultural value, that doesn’t instantly mean the author should have no say in whether and how it is made public.
The author does have a say, but is sometimes overruled. There is was no “instantly” about it in the cases I know of, for instance when Brod downvoted Kafka. Quite the opposite: hands were wrung and consciences closely inspected.
That’s part of the spectacle expected from people who do things they shouldn’t do. “A prince, therefore, should only keep his word when it suits his purposes, but do his utmost to maintain the illusion that he does keep his word and that he is reliable in that regard”. This was a commonplace in the “mirrors for princes” writen in the 16C-17C, not just in this one from which I quote.
“With a heavy heart and a sigh of regret”, as Luhmann puts it.
I also object to the dead hand, especially the infinitely prolonged dead hand. It’s appalling that a letter John Adams wrote in 1755, before there was a United States, is still in U.S. copyright and will be until 2052. As Hat said (in opposition to a point I was making, but what the hell) there is a difference between cutting off your hair (setting reasonable restrictions) and cutting off your head (destroying your work).
The author does have a say, but is sometimes overruled.
There is an obvious analogy with wills disposing of property. Theoretically, a person’s wishes as stated in the will should be respected, but if those wishes turn out to be unreasonable, unfair, etc the will can be contested. This happens especially if the person’s last will, made shortly before their death at an advanced age, is quite different from earlier wills and gives indication of outside pressure or disturbed mental functions or both.
In the case of authors, if they really wanted their work to be destroyed, why didn’t they destroy it themselves much earlier?
As for artists creating while depressed, I don’t believe that they would not have created anything if they had not been depressed, they would have created other works, quite as good if not better than the ones they did create. But currently prescribed antidepressants might not have been the solution to their depression, since those drugs do have side effects affecting mental functions in general, including creativity. There are other approaches to treating depression.
I do care about culture, but I also care about humans.
So do I. A dead human is no longer a human; a dead human is just a lump of organic matter. I understand the need people feel to treat the corpses of their loved ones with dignity, and I respect it, but that is for their own sake, not for the no-longer-existent person. As long as a writer is alive, they should of course have full control over their work; once they’re dead, they are (or should be) irrelevant to its future fate. To sit around wringing one’s hands and pontificating about what the deceased wanted done in a world in which they no longer exist is pious nonsense, and to make a comparison with the situation of a living artist who may or may not need antidepressants (and are you suggesting that antidepressants should be forced on them against their will?) is either not thought through or said in bad faith.
In that case you were much more clearly wrong, since Nabokov obviously had a right to determine the disposition of his unpublished work, and a right to trust his son to honor his wishes.
As you will have gathered by now, I entirely disagree. His son had a right to do whatever he wanted, as literary executor, and the dead author had no rights at all.
In the case of authors, if they really wanted their work to be destroyed, why didn’t they destroy it themselves much earlier?
Exactly.
O.K., I see what you’re saying.
(I still disagree, but at least your point of view now sounds reasoned-out rather than narcissistic.)
> and are you suggesting that antidepressants should be forced on them against their will?
Certainly not! Simply that we shouldn’t oppose antidepressants on the principle that Art might benefit from some people’s depression.
Indeed. Consider Doctor Faustus.
For every literary executor who nobly declines to follow purported directions to destroy stuff, there may well be another one who pursues a strategy that is socially counterproductive and unlikely to be in accord with the hypothetical wishes of the deceased (whether that be by being too tight-fisted with permissions or by just dumping everything on the market at once with no quality control in hope of getting some quick $). It is probably (have never had professional occasion to look at it . . .) permissible in at least some jurisdictions to impose by the terms of ones will or similar legally-operative document some limitations and give some directions, although as a practical matter these ought to be ones that some other still-alive person could go to court to enforce. For example, something saying “none of those sexually-explicit diary passages may be published during the lifetime of my widow without her express written consent” might well be ok, as would something saying “I direct my executor to give Such-and-Such Press the right of first refusal to publish such-and-such manuscripts.”
I have a published-author friend from college (in the sf/fantasy genre) who was commissioned to complete (with full co-author credit) an unfinished-at-death novel by a presumably well-known author in the same genre, but I have no idea how that came about (whether the concept in general or particular had been blessed by the decedent while still alive, or the literary executor decided to do it on his/her own authority etc.).
In the cases of continuators that I know about in modern times, namely Robert Goldsborough (for Nero Wolfe), Jill Paton Walsh (for Peter Wimsey / Harriet Vane), Eric von Lustbader (for the Bourne series), Jeffrey Deaver (for James Bond), etc., the request has generally come from the estate without regard to the wishes of the deceased, if any. Many people tried to write Wolfe stories in Rex Stout’s lifetime, and he described them all as abominably written and entirely misusing the characters, with one of the worst being sent to him by Robert Moses!
Ye men of to much faith! The answer to your quarrels was given by a German jew already in 1848:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
In short: If money can be earned by somebody from the work of poor Rosemary Tonks her work will live. If not, it may together with herself and according to her wish, rest in peace.
Why do I feel haunted by a specter?
Nobody’s earning money from this collective work we are generating here; indeed, Hat is losing money on it, and perhaps so are others (on the principle that time is money). Marx misunderestimated how much the gift economy would thrive even under industrial capitalism.
on the principle that time is money
Now I understand why I am always so short on time !
The combination of Hat’s feeling haunted by a specter, John’s equilibristic handling of words, misunderestimated, and Stu’s lack of money would make a great author, could they just find an industrial capitalist like Friedrich Engels to help them out of the gift economy and get published.
Stefan: Misunderestimated was coined by our former president George W. Bush, the Great Miscommunicator. And scholarly publishing, like blog publishing, is part of the gift economy, except that there is a tollkeeper between writer and reader who contributes nothing these days except the title of the journal.
We *are* all published. Here. It is great!
Publishing poetry, which is where we started, is a loss-making enterprise anyway, even in English. (In the UK it relies on Arts Council, which is to say government, subsidy.)
Mea culpa, John, that Bushian neologism (alongside others of the kind) I had actually heard of. But in spite of this minor stroke of mine I of course never for even a fraction of a second thought of your ‘misunderestimated’ as anything but a joke. Subsequently my reply was also purely jocular. Blog publishing is great (why would we otherwise participate) but perhaps sometimes a little bit misoverestimated.
Almost everyone who participates in academic publishing typically gets paid; it’s just that not all of them get paid directly by the purchasers of the resulting books. The employees of the publisher itself get paid, even if the publisher runs at a loss (which is tolerated by the sponsoring entity because the press is believed to add to the prestige of the institution, which generates positive flow elsewhere); the authors typically get paid by their employers, and their ability to get tenured, promoted, hired away by a more prestigious institution (all of which have cash value) is typically associated with the “publications” section of their CV.
*blink* what
what is this I don’t even
I can’t even
I’ve lost all ability to even
All that’s true, but it is a second-order sense of “paid”. You might as well say I get paid to wear pants to the office, because if I omitted them, I’d lose my job. In general, though, I am paid for making ontologies, not for being a fashion plate.
David M.: the old Anglo-American tradition was that unpublished works were not strictly speaking copyrighted but could subsequently obtain copyright protection whenever they were first published, even if that was an arbitrarily long time (decades or even centuries) after they had been written. That is no longer the case, but there were transitional issues. The Copyright Office summarizes the current U.S. situation as: “Any work that was neither published nor registered as of Jan. 1, 1978, and whose author died before 1933 entered the public domain on Jan. 1, 2003, unless it was published on or before Dec. 31, 2002. If the author died in 1933 or later, the work will be protected for 70 years after the author’s death.” The Adams letter in question (taking the anecdote at face value) must have been first published in the latter part of the 20th century.
All that’s true, but it is a second-order sense of “paid”. You might as well say I get paid to wear pants to the office, because if I omitted them, I’d lose my job
That’s not a valid analogy. JWB is saying that though there is an appearance of non-payment in academic publishing, a principal function of academic publishing is in fact to enhance the income and potential income of the people who write its articles. I’m quite sure no principal function of your job is related to your pants or lack thereof.
Legal publishing is similar, because it’s one of the few ways that lawyers can promote their services (at least traditionally; loosened regulations in some jurisdictions and the Internet have changed the equation).
JWB: Indeed. Copyright ownership in the letter and Adams’s other correspondence was transferred to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1956. They published the correspondence on microfilm and copyrighted it in the same year, renewing the copyright in 1984.
PO: I think the analogy is quite precise. You don’t get paid more in proportion to how much you publish; you need to publish sufficient quality and quantity to keep your job at all. (Tenure complicates this, but that’s an argument that applies to both sides.)
Note fwiw that everything first published in 1956 (whether centuries-old or just-written) would be in the public domain in the U.S. by now but for subsequent changes in the law thought imprudent in some quarters.
To me, there seems to be a very tenuous relationship between how much I publish as an academic and how much I get paid. There is a relationship between publishing output and how much of a raise I get, but even there it turns out to be a minor contributor. It feels a lot more reasonable to say that I’m paid for wearing pants at work than that I’m paid to publish.
David:
…finish a sentence.
To me, there seems to be a very tenuous relationship between how much I publish as an academic and how much I get paid.
Many advertisers have a similar issue: Which advertisement brought the sales? Ditto media relations practitioners: Which article did my client good?
I am not a lawyer but have worked in the legal realm for many years. Those lawyers who seek to have articles published in law journals and law books do so because it’s one of the few ways to promote themselves among their peers and thus gain client referrals. I have been inside man at the skunk works at a number of multiple-author law books addressed to a professional community where only the general editor received royalty payments, and they were far, far less than what I was paid by him.
Many advertisers have a similar issue: Which advertisement brought the sales?
That’s partly because of the bizarre way in which ad agencies are paid: the more ads, the more they get. Years ago, Anheuser-Busch and their then agency. Dancer Fitzgerald, agreed to something innovative: DF would be paid not in proportion to advertising but in proportion to sales. If sales went up on a constant ad budget, DF got more; if sales went down, they got less. As a result, DF actually did some research into what worked and what didn’t.
In particular, they discovered that the only thing people retain from billboards is the name of the product. Since the average consumer sees the name “Budweiser” about ten times a day (on cans, on signs in bars, etc.), DF decided no further exposure was needed, and cancelled all billboard advertising. Big savings, no drop in sales, A-B saved money, DF made money.
That was a long time ago, and it’s hard for innovations to stick when they don’t catch on. New agency for A-B, new people all around. They are probably back to paying for ads just like everybody else, and may not even remember it was ever otherwise.
Does anyone want to buy my copy of Ilead of Broken Sentences it is only £300 ex library copy with some foxing. Definitely a slim volume but packed with great poetry because I intend to buy the anthology when it comes out.
I should perhaps note for the record that that “Both legs broken” line comes from Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren; it is written by a character in the novel, and refers to the appearance of a body at the bottom of an open elevator shaft.
I started Dhalgren with great enthusiasm (having loved his earlier work) but never finished it; I’ve probably already told the story about its blowing off a ledge into the toilet, which I took as a sign from above. (I’ve had it objected that that book is too much of a doorstop to blow off of anything, but this was back in the days when even fat paperbacks could be wedged into pockets.)
Is rhere any international authority unto which I can make complaints upon the use of the name Dhalgren? It’s a violation of the proper Swedish surname Dahlgren, from dal, ‘valley’ and gren, ‘branch’, i.e. ‘Valley-branch’.
Swedish middle-class surnames are typically formed by a combination of two environmental features like Ekberg, ‘Oak-mountain’, Bergman, ‘Mountain-man’, Lindbergh, ‘Lime (tree)-mountain’, Ångström, (angstroms), ‘Steam-stream’ etc. The combinations are often meaningless like Dahlberg, ‘Valley-mountain’ (whatever that’s supposed to mean)?
The insertion of an ‘h’ is purely decorative. Use it as you like but please insert it in the right position according to our standards.
My mother was put off reading Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, because its beginning is set in the city of Erhenrang (on another world), which she could not avoid reading as a gratuitous misspelling of Ehrenrang ‘honorary rank’. To me, Erhenrang looks rather Chinese, but I doubt it really is either German or Chinese: Le Guin sketched a bit of the Karhidish language, enough to write some short poems, but never published them.
The title of Dhalgren, though, does not refer to any person or place in the book; instead, there is a moment where the protagonist hears a mixture of conversations as the single noise “grendal grendal grendal” repeated over and over and then loses track of where the beginning and end is, so that the sound is transformed into “dhalgren dhalgren dhalgren”, with the syllables reversed. The book itself looks something like this; like Finnegans Wake, it begins with the end of a sentence, the start of which appears at the end. Though it is not as verbally difficult as the Wake, the narrator is extremely unreliable, and it is often difficult to follow the plot, such as it is. Also like the Wake the text is riddled with typos, which don’t even tend to get eliminated over time, and people tend to either adore it or despise it. My early experiences with the Wake, I think, predisposed me to be interested in Dhalgren; it seems rather more normal to me than it probably does to other people.
The argument has been made that certain responsa of Rashi (1040-1105) that were not published (though preserved in libraries) until 1925 are still under copyright, because the editor, Menachem Mendel Kasher, died in 1983 in a life+90 country. I don’t believe this, however. The Adams copyright works because Adams’s works were copyrighted under Massachusetts law during his lifetime and passed down to the publisher, the MHS. There was no copyright in Rashi’s day, and even if there were, there is no chain of ownership leading from Rashi to Kasher. The special contents of Kasher’s edition, including any corrigenda to the manuscripts, are certainly under copyright, but anyone could go back to the original MSS and copy them.
Nothing surprises me after copyrighted Bible.
@SFReader:
The point of the copyright with Bible translations is generally to prevent tampering with the text, a serious issue for anyone who has a high view of the authority of the text in question – pretty much always the case with both the actual translators and their sponsors.
It occurred to me rather late in the day that the Kusaal Bible translations were copyright, and that I needed formal permission to cite from them in my grammar; the publishers were in fact very helpful.
“I won’t spoil it for you but obituary” is not entirely without bespoilment, if it comes to that
Certainly. (But the linked obituary does explain much of the rest of the mystery.)
I wonder whether, before her fate became entirely known, any Harry Potter fic writer ever tried to shoehorn Rosemary Tonks into the family of Ted and Nymphadora Tonks. I know that I myself would not have been able to resist this if I ever had an opportunity.
(The article mentions the possibility that she was perhaps Rowling’s inspiration; I find it unlikely, but not sufficiently unlikely to throw out entirely. Someone should ask.)
–
On copyright matters – there was a funny case in 2010…
Terra, a big Russian publishing house (mostly focused on deluxe editions and multi-volume encyclopedias), sued Astrel, an even bigger (and more general-purpose) Russian publishing house, for publishing several works of Alexander Belyaev (d. Jan 6, 1942) without permission, and claimed to have obtained exclusive permission from the estate.
Russian copyright law used to be life+15 (life+25 after 1973) in Soviet times; in August 1993, it was extended to life+50 (with some clarifications irrelevant to this particular case). In 2004, there was a further revision to life+70, which was extended in 2006 retroactively to those works whose 1993 copyright reached the date of the 1993 law. (I recall having seen a Wikipedia discussion regarding the fact that this placed into copyright many works that were under public domain previously.)
Since 1993, there was, however, an additional clause – works by authors who worked during the Great Patriotic War got an extra four years to the term (presumably to account for the disruptions of the war).
Astrel claimed that the “worked during the war” clause did not apply to Belyaev, who died less than seven months after the war started; in this case, the copyright of his works would have expired in January 1993, and thus would not have been extended in 2006.
Terra replied that the clause did in fact apply, and managed to find some (obscure) works by Belyaev written and published in those seven months; as such, the copyright did not expire until 1997, and was thus extended all the way to January 2017.
(There were also apparently some complications in the wording of the 2006 extension, which as written did not appear to apply to the war clause at all. As far as I understand, Terra decided to cover this by creating an otherwise unrelated court case against another branch of itself… it’s a very complicated story.)
The case was complicated by the somewhat peculiar formula that Terra used to claim reimbursement; essentially, the claim went that each copy of the supposedly illegal publication by Astrel corresponded to one non-bought copy of the legal publication by Terra, and thus multiplied the number of sold copies of the Astrel publication by the price of the Terra publication (and further by some punitive coefficient, but I don’t recall the exact details).
As it happened, the only version of Belyaev’s works offered at the time by Terra was an ultra-deluxe limited edition priced at about $4000 per copy, while the Astrel book was a common cheap one (don’t recall if paperback or hardcover). So the result of the multiplications came out to something like a quarter billion dollars – well over the entire net worth of the Astrel company.
The court ruled in favor of Terra on the copyright case. Astrel appealed, and won; Terra appealed back. In March 2011, another court decided that maybe the works of Belyaev were not copyrighted after all, and threw out both decisions.
Finally, in July 2011, yet another court ultimately did rule in favor of Terra, but denied the reimbursement formula, and calculated based on the price of the Astrel books ($5-10 each).
In 2012, Astrel went bankrupt for unrelated reasons (essentially, tax evasion), and was bought out by yet another publisher; the brand name is still active.
Terra exists to this day, and still isn’t in the business of making cheap common books.
As far as I know, the works of Belyaev did enter public domain (yet again) in January 2017.
This is grimly fascinating.
Any idea why Russia went on the path of repeated copyright lifetime extensions? In the US, it was supposedly through the pressure of Disney. What is the Russian analog?
Good lord, what a tangled tale!
@Stefan, I’ve seen a claim that Delany had seen and liked the Swedish surname and wanted to use it in the book, but misremembered where the H should go. And yes, it causes a little cognitive dissonance for me too, but not enough to want to lodge complaints with the Powers That Be.
As I remember I dropped the book after thirty pages of which each one had at least one mention of broken / ragged / bitten fingernails. His other books aren’t that heavy on fingernails, but that was too much. Call me sensitive.
I dropped the book after more than thirty pages but less than halfway through—or to be more exact, a breeze blew it off the ledge where I had placed it into the toilet below, which I took as a sign from heaven. I had been struggling manfully, refusing to give up because I’d enjoyed his earlier stuff so much, but I felt empowered to let it go, and I’ve never given it another try (though I’ve seen people rave about it).
Any idea why Russia went on the path of repeated copyright lifetime extensions? In the US, it was supposedly through the pressure of Disney. What is the Russian analog?
As far as I understand, it was mostly pressure from other countries with longer terms (in modern days life+50 is unusually short for a copyright term). In the 1990s, Russia actually tried to do its best to keep shorter copyright terms in as many cases as reasonably possible, but it ultimately didn’t work out.
One of those other countries was the USA, so indirectly it might well have also been due to Disney.
As it happens, by now, for the purpose of determining which works are still in copyright (e.g. for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects), the “still copyrighted in 1993” clause is irrelevant – any work whose 50-year term ran out prior to 1993 would’ve had its new 70-year term, had one existed, run out already anyway.
Well, in the Copenhagen Science Fiction Circle (capital C, this was a club with its own periodical and so on) in the eighties it was a sort of merit badge to have read Dhalgren to the end. Implying that even the minority who accomplished the feat only did it because it was an ‘important’ work, not because they enjoyed it.
I’ve since encountered a similar attitude towards Ulysses which I haven’t even attempted myself.
I don’t think it at all improbable that “Erhenrang” was inspired by at least a sighting of “Ehrenrang.” Le Guin is a clever inventor of names, but not a language obsessive on the Tolkien (or even my) level. Anyone else suspect “Obsle” is derived from “bobsled”?
And I’m a bit surprised that no one has invoked Stendhal.
Obsle
Perhaps. Le Guin has repudiated the theory that Ged < God, though. Per contra, Larry Niven has admitted to recycling typos, notably (hachiroph) shisp < ships.
@Lars:
“Ulysses” is vastly more accessible than “Finnegans Wake.” I reread “Ulysses” with enjoyment every few years, but despite general goodwill towards the project have never managed to get further into the Wake than the conversation between the Mute and the Jute (which is quite enjoyable.)
I usually advise people re “Ulysses” never to read it with a commentary, not to stop if they don’t understand something (that’s part of the effect aimed at) and above all not to lose sight of the fact that (like Proust) it’s also meant to be funny.
@David, Finnegan’s Wake was what I meant as the work with ‘trophy’ status in some circles. Teach me to post in a hurry. I still didn’t read either but perhaps I should give Ulysses a try.
Your advice reminds me of trying to get my mother to read Lord of the Rings — first three tries she never got past the preface on pipeweed, and being a librarian* it was very hard to get her to just skip it.
_______________
* I know, but you understood it anyway
Definitely give Ulysses a try, and if you find the first chapter hard going skip ahead to later ones — each is in a different style, and some people find Stephen Dedalus’s philosophical maunderings hard to take and prefer Bloom’s earthier musings.
The Bloodaxes did bring out Tonks’s collected in the aftermath. I’ve almost-bought it at least twice, but my poetry budget (of both money and time) is finite and it always seems to just miss the cut.
Is probably a good idea to get on with it, though, because Bloodaxe physical books mostly don’t stay in print forever.
a breeze blew it off the ledge
I admit that breeze covers a wide range of wind speeds including Beaufort forces 2–6 (6–49 km/hr, 4–31 mph, 4–27 knots, 1.6–13.8 m/s), but to my ear breeze unqualified means the lower rather than the upper end of that range, at least on land (AHD agrees, and points out that a breeze means ‘easy’). I would suggest that the next time you tell this story you use “strong gust of wind” or something. Dhalgren is 836 pages long, a true doorstop for 1976 and substantial enough even today that it would take quite a wind to shift it.
(Belatedly it occurs to me that you might have had the book open and face-up, and that the wind turned enough pages to unbalance it, but even then I would suspect a cat was involved.)
It was a paperback and I don’t recall its being that heavy, but it was a long time ago and who knows? Though it probably was open, and a cat may have been involved.
@Lars:
“Your advice reminds me of trying to get my mother to read Lord of the Rings — first three tries she never got past the preface on pipeweed, and being a librarian* it was very hard to get her to just skip it.”
Puts me in mind of this, from Anthony Powell:
“I was turning the pages that evening with the sense – essential to mature enjoyment of any classic – of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.”
I don’t agree with him as to “any” classic, but (a) he’s talking, not altogether seriously, about the consolations of old age (b) he’s not talking in propria persona but in the voice of a narrator who’s not quite him (c) the work in question is Orlando Furioso. ‘Nuff said.
I have been known to hang open-because-being-read books over the edge of tables or shelves with the heaviest part on the top surface. This can be somewhat precarious though, and even being a dog person I’d probably refrain from doing so near facilities containing water.
Now I mostly use Kindle reader on my phone, and have coincidentally transferred the water avoidance to that device.
Puts me in mind of this, from Anthony Powell
Ah yes, A Dance to the Music of Time — I thought it sounded familiar! Powell got me to give Ariosto a try; see this post from a couple of years back. (I never finished it, unsurprisingly.)
I just checked, and Bloodaxe Books has published Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems & Selected Prose, available (at the moment) for $14.37, far more reasonable than $1477.67 plus shipping.
John Cowan
> I should perhaps note for the record that that “Both legs broken” line comes from Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren; it is written by a character in the novel, and refers to the appearance of a body at the bottom of an open elevator shaft.
I thought it was pretty clear what happened in the buildup to that scene? Of course, as in anything in Dhalgren you can interpreted it in many ways (what might have happened, with our unreliable narrator), but this one is quite clear, compared to others events (if you consider reality around and within Bellona (an within and without the building as real, anyway).
It took me two years, but I did finish it, and even if I asked Chip now, I could, but I would just advise you to just read the book.
David Eddyshaw: are you absolutely sure Proust is meant to be funny?
@V:
Oh yes. No doubt about it at all. Not just funny, of course.
The title of Dhalgren, though, does not refer to any person or place in the book; instead, there is a moment where the protagonist hears a mixture of conversations as the single noise “grendal grendal grendal” repeated over and over and then loses track of where the beginning and end is, so that the sound is transformed into “dhalgren dhalgren dhalgren”, with the syllables reversed.
(Nine years later:) So why not “dalgren”??
Because the author remembered the perfectly cromulent Swedish name Dahlgren, didn’t have any context for it, misremembered it, and then built the entire book around it like the T-14 tank is built around an engine developed for oil pumps.
I’ve encountered someone who goes by Dhorvath on teh intarwebz; he said he encountered the word once, couldn’t remember any context for it, but thought it was interesting enough to use as a username. I immediately spotted the Horváth in it (a common Hungarian surname: “Croatian” plus a cosmetic -h); he must have read of a D. Horváth.
It’s a compelling name, anything polysyllabic ending in -Vth for some reason seems to be for Anglophones. I recall an RPG where where, for some reason, Horvath was given as the name of a giant armored lizard enemy. (This gave a slight uncanny moment when I later encountered it in the original usage… some people might have nerdy first names these days, but you still don’t really expect random people to have names to the effect of Andrew Balrog.)
“grendal grendal grendal”
why not “dalgren”?
Dahlgren
that’s one way to read the source of the title.
there’s also the list of names written in one of the kid(d)’s notebooks, which becomes a reappearing litany in his mind, but (the kid(d) tells us) has eroded at one point (close to the end of the novel, which may or may not be the end of the timeline of its events) to the single name “William Dhalgren”.
that connection does a little to make the dahl/dhal substitution make sense, too: the first time the list appears, a character who shares a surname with someone on it turns out to have a relative with a name that’s similarly just-off the listed name: “Virgilia” as opposed to “Virginia”.
and, extra-textually, either or both could easily have a practical origin in delany’s dyslexia, or be a deliberate insertion of it into the text, or both.
probably needless to say, i adore the book and generally encourage folks who like ’em long and complex to keep trying – i certainly didn’t get to the end on my first time through (and i’ve lost track of how many times i’ve read it since). but it’s certainly not everyone’s meat.
Day saved (two minutes after midnight).
names to the effect of Andrew Balrog
That would be another person from whom Tolkien wouldn’t want to have received a letter:
“I had recently a letter from Sam Gamgee, of Tooting: a genuine person of that name. He seemed a little surprised. (Thank goodness it was not S Gollum; I live in fear of receiving a note from him; he won’t be quite so pleased.)”
Quoted from the first source that came up googling for the quote; but I have come across it elsewhere as well.
rozele: I’ve only read it once and it took me a few months. It’s still my favourite book.
@Stefan Holm “Is rhere any international authority unto which I can make complaints upon the use of the name Dhalgren? It’s a violation of the proper Swedish surname Dahlgren, from dal, ‘valley’ and gren, ‘branch’, i.e. ‘Valley-branch’. […]. The insertion of an ‘h’ is purely decorative. Use it as you like but please insert it in the right position according to our standards.”
In light of the Swedish family names Dhalström and Dhunér (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial), do you not think it possible that *?Dhalgren occurs too?
Swedish telephone directories might reveal more such names.
Naturally, to be excluded from consideration are family names occurring in Sweden that are not composed of Swedish elements, such as Dhahir, Dharsani, Dhilsana, and Dholey.
Oh.
*looking over shoulder for the Spanish Inquisition*
…and now I notice Stendhal has been mentioned above, and I knew that name anyway. Well, as the saying goes: was nicht sein darf, kann nicht sein “what isn’t allowed to be can’t be” – “what isn’t supposed to exist can’t possibly exist”…
I suspect it may have been motivated to prevent readings with the wrong vowel length: [daːl.greːn] and not ˣ[dalʝ.reːn]. Not that the latter would mean anything in this case as far as I know (what’s a “dallow reindeer”?), but it’s at least theoretically there, while it’s very clear that e.g. Ekberg will not syllabify as **[ɛkb.ærʝ]. Other examples I can think of similarly have sonorant codas: Ahl-, Ehn-, Ehr-, Grahn-, Kihl-, Krohn-, Pihl-, Sahl- etc. Maybe the quality of the vowel also matters somehow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen e.g. a Gröhn- or a Nyh-. (OTOH, while double-checking that I’m not forgetting something obvious, I did run into one Norwegian counterexample: Krohg.)
That makes perfect sense as yet another orthographic Germanism, of course.
…even though Tal lacks it; its long vowel is marked just by the automatic vowel lengthening of monosyllabic words that end in at most one consonant, and Swedish never had that process AFAIK.
Swedish and Norwegian have no short syllables, but I don’t remember if it was the vowels or the consonants that longified to avoid them. Trond knows, The same used to apply to Danish, which is where the orthographic rule of marking a short vowel with a doubled consonant comes from, but we didn’t have time for long consonants so now we do have short syllables.
As an example, it was recently pointed out to me (because I said it wrong) that Sw guds has a short vowel, but gud is long. [gɵᵝds] vs [gʏᵝ:d].
There really isn’t one simple rule for lengthening. It depends on sentence prosody and the type of consonant, and it varies between dialects, obscured by intra-dialect loans and influence from written Danish. Luckily for the learner, we hardly even notice.
One example is these two common verbs:
ON koma “come”, vera “be”,
Norw. Bm. komme, være
Norw. Nyn. (arch.) koma, vera
Trad Eastern dial. komma, verra (Virru verrame tebyn? Da fårru komma nå, “Will-you come-with to-the-town? Then must-you come now.”)
Trønder (“vowel balancing”): kåmmå, vårrå
John Cowan: “I should perhaps note for the record that that “Both legs broken” line comes from Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren; it is written by a character in the novel, and refers to the appearance of a body at the bottom of an open elevator shaft.”
I remember that scene vividly — it was when Kidd visited the family that were still living in their apartment and desperately trying to pretend nothing is out of the normal.