1. "Ennui": The online literary journal Blackbird today debuts a recently discovered, never-before-published poem by Sylvia Plath.
["Sylvia Plath wrote “Ennui” during her undergraduate years and may have intended to publish it, as she placed her name and address at Smith College in the upper right-hand corner of the typed poem, a practice which she often followed with poems she considered good enough for submission to journals. However, she may have simply been identifying the poem for her teacher, Alfred Young Fisher, with whom she took a special studies course in poetry during the spring of her senior year in 1955."]
2. "Marie Antoinette": Sofia Coppola's latest, analyzed by critic Ryland Walker Knight.
["It certainly seems easy, and chic, to dismiss Sofia Coppola's career as a film director, amping up her apparent "poor little rich girl" persona as a critical debunker. But envy is not an analytic argument. Envy is a facile batting of the eyes, as supercilious as all the shoes and cakes and gowns and champagne a young princess could ever hope to cloud her life with. Of course, Sofia's life is enviable to legions of hip, would-be jetsetting shoppers with funny money to burn. But that's not what the film hopes to inspire in its audience, even if it meets those ends. Marie Antoinette plays not as polemic history lesson, as many would hope (the politics are sublimated, mostly kept off screen), but as a near naked autobiographical justification for downright girliness and Coppola's latest defense for the virtues of adolescent vacuum ennui."]
3. "Deadwood Pancakes": What hath Al Swearengen wrought?
4. "A nos amours": From the fall issue of Cineaste, Jared Rapfogel reviews the Criterion Collection release of Maurice Pialat's neglected masterpiece.
["Criterion has taken the first step in redressing the injustice of Pialat’s obscurity by enshrining 1983's A nos amours in their pantheon. Pialat made only ten features in his lifetime, all of them essential, but A nos amours is in some ways the ideal place to start, thanks to the unforgettable performance by a young Sandrine Bonnaire as Suzanne, but above all because of the presence of Pialat himself in the crucial role of Suzanne’s father—it seems appropriate that those unfamiliar with Pialat should begin with a film in which he is doubly present."]
5. "MySpace Acts To Halt Music Piracy": A report from Louis Hou at Forbes.com.
["News Corp.'s MySpace said it has agreed to license technology from Gracenote to block unauthorized uploads of copyrighted music to the social-networking Web site."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Links for the Day (November 1st, 2006)
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4 comments:
Re: Plath's poem, which definitely reads like a major poet still finding her way, I love the phrase, "...no perils left to conquer." Ennui is stasis so profound that not only are you not hoping for a crisis to jump-start your life again, you can't even imagine anyone else imagining such a thing.
I like reading this poem and then listening to the guy's monologue in "Deadwood Pancakes." Sylvia Fucking Plath would have loved that show.
The link with the most profound ramifications, though, is #5. Pretty soon I expect that any site dealing in mass-produced art or entertainment (or commentary on same) will have to install this sort of filtering software or risk lawsuits or some other penalty. And even if they don't, as technology grows mor sophisticated it'll soon be much easier for copyright owners to survey the entire web and figure out if anybody's trading, posting or sharing their material without paying for it.
If the Internet is indeed the Wild West, I'd say this development signals that we're somewhere around 1885 or so. Once technology exists to automatically track content all over the Net, and report back to the copyright owners that it's being reproduced without permission, YouTube and similar services will have to pay royalties (however minimal) or else spend all of their profits paying lawyers. The only thing standing between such sites and even more (and increasingly serious) lawsuits is the 24 hours in a day rule -- nobody has the time to sit there Googling all day to figure out if somebody's reprinting a Sylvia Plath poem without permission or posting the opening credits of The Wire without asking HBO's okay. Once easy, cheap spyware (or some other program) can go out and do the job for you, looking for the equivalent of watermarks embedded in copyrighted content, it's going to be a whole new era.
"Once easy, cheap spyware (or some other program) can go out and do the job for you, looking for the equivalent of watermarks embedded in copyrighted content, it's going to be a whole new era."
Technology can go either way. I'm sure in the near future, more advanced versions of Gracenote will be able to track down all the copyright infringers in a quick scan. But right now, there is already the emergence of encrypted programs like Freenet that allows users to do anything on the Web - and that includes swapping files. Since anonymity is totally assured, it is likely that people will keep on swappin'.
I will admit to being terribly biased :) I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that time will be on the Internet's side.
That Ryland guy's a temp who works in my office. I didn't know he wrote movie reviews! He's good!
Hey, due to some shuffling of my personal deck of cards, my blog address was changed so that link above will not work anymore. This one should.
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