WildCards

“On the one hand, then, by conceding copyright society declares that it holds individual creativity in high respect—every member of society can dream of one day benefiting from copyright, of transforming genius into money—but by the same token it draws the author into a bourgeois mentality where writing is a job with an income; the writer now has an investment in stable markets and attentive policing. In short, copyright keeps the writer in the polis, and indeed it is remarkable how little creative writing today is truly revolutionary, in the sense of seeking a profoundly different model of a society. There is a subversive writerly attitude, of course, liberal, anti-authoritarian, which has paradoxically become almost a convention; dissatisfaction with society is expected of an author. All the same with a royalty check whose arrival relies on international agreements, electronic funds transfer, and a willingness to prosecute copyright piracy, he or she is more a creature of the status quo than its enemy. Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps it is limiting. Perhaps good things are inevitably limiting.”

“There is still an enormous demand for the long traditional novel, for works that reinforce the idea of individual identity projected through time and achieving some kind of wisdom or happiness through many vicissitudes…Copyright, we see, is not essentially driven by notions of justice or theories of ownership, but by a certain culture’s attachment to a certain literary form.”

(via PenAmerican, NYBooks)