Loose ends.

Some great responses to yesterday’s filibuster, and links for further investigation of the theme: who said plagiarism a bad thing?
Neil Gaiman wrote:
"Richard Posner (a remarkable judge and legal mind, oddly enough the appeal's court judge who ruled for me in the McFarlane case) just did a book about this, from a writer's point of view, saying the same thing as you Eddie, more or less: There's a review in the LA Times (Jan 28):
The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard A. Posner
"Theft or imitation? A respected judge considers the possibilities.
At 116 pages — and small pages at that — Richard A. Posner's "The Little Book of Plagiarism" is aptly titled. It's a brief but provocative and illuminating meditation on the current craze for searching out, denouncing and punishing authors who appear to have borrowed the work of others and passed it off as their own. Ever the controversialist, Posner is willing to entertain the idea that plagiarism is hardly the high crime that moralists in the media and the academy advertise it as…
…he complains about "the absurd idea that 'copying' is inherently bad" and the "growing belief that literary, artistic, and other intellectual goods are not really 'creative' unless they are 'original.' "

Bat Masterson drew my attention to a similar enterprise by Jonathan Lethem in Harper’s (Jan 31):
The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism
"And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.

…does our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?

Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn—radio, the Internet—the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty."

The essay is long and wonderful. I will be keeping a copy in my permanent file. Go and read it now.

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Apropos of talking about William Hogarth here on Jan 24, Ben Smith has linked me to a Feb 6th review in the Guardian of a new Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain
The fun of filth
"Hogarth may not have been a great painter, but who cares? The world he gave us is rich, rude, teeming with life - and wonderfully familiar, says Adrian Searle"
Away down in the body of the piece, this line struck a note of horror in me:
"We should also remember that people were still being burned at the stake, beheaded for treason, hanged, flayed, pilloried and whipped in public in London."

BURNED AT THE STAKE? As late as Hogarth’s time? (he died 1764) I need to check this...

I found Richard clark’s site on the history of capital punishment, in which there is a page devoted to burning.
And it gets worse. By the 18th century burning was reserved for women. Apparently they didn’t want people coming to view the proceedings for the wrong reason:
" Men who were convicted of high treason were hanged, drawn and quartered but this was not deemed acceptable for women as it would have involved nudity. Until 1790, every woman convicted of counterfeiting gold or silver coin of the realm, was sentenced to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution and there " to be burned with fire till she was dead." (Blackstone's Commentaries, 204. Ibid, 377) In Britain after 1700, women who were sentenced to be burnt were allowed by law to be strangled with a rope before the fire got to them and thus died in much the same way as they would have by hanging."

"The Times newspaper: “The execution of a woman for coining on Wednesday morning, reflects a scandal upon the law and was not only inhuman, but shamefully indelicate and shocking. Why should the law in this species of offence inflict a severer punishment upon a woman, than a man. It is not an offence which she can perpetrate alone - in every such case the insistence of a man has been found the operating motive upon the woman; yet the man is but hanged, and the woman burned.”

The whole ghastly business passed into history in 1790 … "

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Art Spiegelman lectures at Yale, account in the Yale Daily News. of Feb 5:
Graphic novelist defends value of comics genre
By Alice Walton
"The graphic novelist spoke about the comics that influenced him as a young child: 'I learned to read from Batman, I learned about sex from Betty and Veronica … and I learned about everything else from Mad Magazine,' he said.
Audience members making their way into the University Theatre on Friday evening to see famed comic Art Spiegelman were warned right away that this would not be a typical lecture, as signs in the lobby warned that there would be smoking on stage.
'This is not a lecture, this is a performance,' Spiegelman said, as he lit the first of a long chain of cigarettes. 'Because in a performance, you can smoke onstage. Tonight, I will play the part of a neurotic comic book author."

Meanwhile, Time magazine observes the Masters of American Comics exhibition reaching its close: (Feb 3)
Does Mad Need a Museum?
By RICHARD CORLISS
”This snobbery still vexes Spiegelman. "I have all sorts of issues with the idea that a Lichtenstein painting of a comic book panel is art but the original comic panel it draws on is not considered art," he told TIME's Jeanne McDowell for a 2005 story we did on the exhibition. "I hate that whole attitude and way of looking at this stuff. Lichtenstein did for comics what Warhol did for Campbell's Soup – it had nothing to do with comics. It had to do with exploiting the form without any of the content."
Artie, who said that the great mocker, Mad magazine , was his education, is upset at Lichtenstein mocking comics. Aw, diddums.

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Leif Peng has put Anita Virgil’s memoir of her late husband, illustrator Andy Virgil all on its own blog and in consecutive running order. An excellent and moving read.
This week leif is looking at the work of great '50s stylist Joe de Mers

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