Torn and frayed in Manila

"No-one writes from nothing"

There was an excellent survey of the rights and wrongs of copyright in Sunday's New York Times. A lot of it is about some cats called Copy Left (geddit?) who are in favour of a less restrictive copyright regime. I'm always going to be in two minds about copyright, but these people talk some sense:

"No-one writes from nothing": the lone garret-dwelling poet, creating masterpieces out of thin air. ''No one writes from nothing,'' says Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School. ''We all take the world as it is and use it, remix it.''

Their main beef is with the commodication of culture exemplified by like iTunes, Apple's online music store, which they regard as:

"the first step toward a society in which much of the cultural activity that we currently take for granted -- reading an encyclopedia in the public library, selling a geometry textbook to a friend, copying a song for a sibling -- will be rerouted through a system of micropayments in return for which the rights to ever smaller pieces of our culture are doled out. ''Sooner or later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no hope and no going back.''

Gentleman editor

I liked the affectionate portrait of Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, in the current issue of Guardian Books. Silvers and his co-editor Barbara Epstein are throw-backs to a more literate America:

"There is only one story you need to know about Bob," says the writer Timothy Garton Ash. "Four o'clock on Christmas day: the family is gathered around the turkey, and the phone rings. It's Bob. 'Tim,' he says, 'How are you doing? On column six of the third galley, there's a dangling modifier.'"

Well, if there is only one story you need to know about Bob I guess you don’t need to read the article now, but go on – it’s a nice picture of a world and a system of values that is slipping away.

The ingenious Japanese

Good e-mails, like bad rock bands, never really go away. They migrate to another part of cyberspace before returning one day to roost again in your in-box, often in a rather mutated form.

Back in 1999, I received a PowerPoint presentation called “useless inventions from our Japanese friends”. I saved it and forgot about until this morning when I was greeted by a link to “101 unuseless Japanese inventions”, many of which were survivors from the earlier presentation. You decide: useless or unuseless?

What have the Arabs ever done for us?

Robert Kilroy-Silk is a former British Labour politician turned TV pundit who recently made a fool of himself by branding Arabs as "suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors. The learned Kilroy-Silk went on to argue that: " We owe Arabs nothing, apart from oil, which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the west, what do they contribute?" Well, quite a lot it seems, according to an informative rebuttal by Derek Brown in today's Guardian. The pointed arch, for example, which characterizes gothic architecture, was an idea brought back from the Middle East by the early crusaders.

In the field of literature:

Writing is a key part of the Arab nation's bequest to the world. Paper was introduced from China before the end of the first Christian millennium, freeing Arab writers from the costly straitjacket of parchment and papyrus, some 300-400 years before paper reached Western Europe. The result was a torrent of poetry and prose, philosophy and scholarship, learning and entertainment. This was the era of The Thousand and One Nights and of vast public libraries. There were astronomical observatories, pharmaceutical laboratories and medical schools. And most of these were flourishing before England's King Alfred was born.

Brown includes "some useful links for Mr Kilroy-Silk".

Arab achievements in mathematics
Abbasid golden age in Baghdad
The Defra view
Arab search engine
Andalucia
Granada
The Alhambra
Early Arab literatureArab music
The importance of poetry in Arab life
The Thousand and One Nights
Ancient and modern Arab art
Arabic calligraphy
Astronomy in Baghdad
Early Arab architecture (pictures)Contemporary Arab architecture

>

Edward Said (1935-2003)

One compensation for the loss of an intellectual hero is the detail about their personal lives that emerges from the obituaries and tributes. I don’t know why, but I’m somehow glad to know from Christopher Hitchens that Edward Said was always “faultlessly dressed” and that “I never met a woman who did not admire him, and I never knew him to be anything but gallant.” That’s always how I had pictured him.

For all his faults (and Hitchens and others have not been slow to point them out) Said seems to me an intellectual giant, with a vast fund of learning and a clear and polemical writing style. His notions of “the other” and “Orientalism” have become rather hackneyed, but that is not his fault – they have made an enormous contribution to the way we see the world, particularly in the way he exposed the relationship between colonialism and more benign European intellectual movements such as the enlightenment.

Some years ago I received “Reflections on exile”, a collection of essays, as a gift. Although there is much in it to disagree with, it has been a good friend; almost every page sparks an idea. One of Said’s great strengths as a writer was the way he organized his thoughts – although at least some of these essays were probably written in haste to meet some deadline or other they are almost all coherent and clear.

Said’s life and work was rooted in humanism. His opposition to Marxist attempts to reduce art to an expression of ideology was a consistent feature, not only of his criticism, but also of his attempt to use classical music to heal the wounds in the Middle East. The Guardian obituary notes that:

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra he founded with the Israeli citizen Daniel Barenboim in 1999 grew out of the friendship he forged with the musician who shares his belief that art - and, in particular, the music of Wagner - transcends political ideology. With Said's assistance, Barenboim gave master classes for Palestinian students in the occupied West Bank, infuriating the Israeli right.

Said’s support for this project sprung from his own aptitude for music: “To see and hear him play the piano was to be filled with envy as well as joy: one was witnessing a rather angst-prone person who had developed the perfect recreation to an extraordinary pitch.”