On Onus of Ownership

I've enrolled in Fiona Somerset's "Radical Textualities" at Duke this spring, and I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to get some real manuscript experience!  This week we are reading about variance, censorship, and the "great editions" of multi-layered medieval texts.  In an article resisting the bibliographic obsession of previous Wycliffite scholarship, Somerset writes: "In lollard textual culture's mood of radical variance, every version of a text interpolates, excises, or modifies the content they have in common, or else lifts part of it into a different setting.  Often it is impossible to trace how the work developed, in its remaining copies." She focuses on different kinds of books than others working in lollardy usually have; she therefore appropriately hones in on different modes of book production, "that began in the earliest phase of the [lollard] movement, but persisted when the more organized activity that produced large-scale collaborations in England had come to an end"whose "products are more idiosyncratic and decentralized... [and whose] most common venue of assembly is the personal or household anthology..." which was truly piecemeal.
As most of you know, I've had a hard time pinning down a dissertation topic/genre/century, but I do keep returning to manuscript work.  As most of you can imagine, this presents any scholar with the genuine issue of accessibility.  Although Duke and UNC have great collections, getting to them can be more difficult than first supposed.  I'll come back to the accessibility problem soon.

We spent the first couple of classes hashing out ideas about cutting and pasting, remixing, refiguring, re-apropriating (and no, that's not redundant here) manuscripts, printed books, and digital media.  Where do processes overlap?  What do reworking poetry or biblical exegesis, say, have to do with remixing music or other media?  And how does any of this matter now, and to whom?
A visual break from coolest-gadgets.com, to prevent any rabbit-hole vortex of crushingly deep ponderings on this topic:

Of course, central to these questions of remixing is ownership, which I like to distinguish from authorship.  Somerset articulates resistance to a bibliographic impulse in literary studies that coincides with a lesson I taught last week.  I assigned Hegel to my freshmen (muah-ha-ha) to get them into an appropriate mindset about the nature of the course.  I intentionally left off the title and the author so they wouldn't just say "hey, this is boring/difficult/whatever-- I'll just Google it."  Some of them, I found, had pasted in parts of the passage in order to identify the author, and we had an open conversation about this urge to know about the author in order to feel equipped to read the work.  Incidentally, this was the same day as the Wikipedia blackout-- a coincidence whose coolness was sadly lost on some of them.  

Nevertheless, it seems that authorship is visiting some sort of vengeance upon me for all those papers I wrote that "killed the author."  In a time when so much information is free, freely edited, and freely exchanged across different media, what does it mean to be an author, a commentator, a cut-and-paster, a plagiarist?  Authorship isn't always ownership, and that could create great demands on all the other stewards of texts.  What do we owe to audience?  To the text's author? And how much do economic elements of textual production affect its "authenticity" or reliability?  What does the author owe the rest of us?  How influential is money-making to text-making, and why?

Moreover, what are we to make of our transition from this:

No CTRL + C here.

to this?

Inquisitr.com

Is free and full access even conceivable?  At what cost? 

How do we move between prosperity of resources nearly impossible to find (or even to know exist) in our world's best libraries and responsible, equitable accessibility?

Bodleian curator, looking far too cool to let us see this book from the Mary Shelley exhibit.   

Could it be that those Stanford professors have it right after all?

A short geology lesson and an epic tortoise tale

Happy New Year, and welcome back!
Last semester I researched Drayton's use of the sea in Polyolbion and became increasingly interested in,  as my professor best summarized, "how England imagined itself in relationship to the world via the ocean."  What does being an island mean?  How does being surrounded by water influence (especially national) identity?  I'm also wondering about the development of sailors in literature-- certainly, they are not always stalwart navy men, fearless adventurers, or founders of great nations.  How do their identities mesh with those back on land?
One way to address these issues is to read about them; a less academic approach is to visit some islands and see for yourself.
Enter family trip to the Galapagos, an archipelago nearly 1000 km off the coast of Ecuador.  The people, tortoises, iguanas, sharks, and sea lions were all amazing.  Below is the view from our tented camp:

The Pacific is gorgeous, powerful, daunting.  Currents coming from three different directions are particularly strong and responsible for bringing the eclectic group of creatures (from Penguins to lizards) to these wildly isolated islands.  The wave in this photo is well over a meter high.

The archipelago emerged, island by island, over a hotspot on the Nazca-Cocos plate.  Over millions of years, an underwater volcano has erupted to form these islands, which sink and move away from their point of generation at a speed of around 7cm per year.  The plate that carries them is the very plate that goes under the mainland, causing the Andes to rise at a matching rate.  Recently, geologists have discovered the older Galapagos islands under the sea, now submerged after their turn in the sun.  Two of the islands are still active, but have not erupted as recently as Etna.

Speaking of Mt Etna, I chose Aeneid to read on the trip. Although we didn't sail anywhere, reading about sailors tossed about the sea by Fate and the gods fit surprisingly well-- not with our experiences, thankfully, but with the experiences of the animals 'endemic' to the islands.  It is theorized, for instance, that the tortoises floated here on driftwood.  How extraordinarily marked this species is--to bob around in the Pacific, arrive in numbers large enough to continue the species for millennia, and grow in global fame despite (and because) of its isolation.

It's strange to consider all the other creatures-- human and otherwise-- who couldn't land, but the sea is as creative as it is destructive. A recent expedition to a hotspot near Antarctica revealed a surprising number of newly discovered species well over a mile below the surface (article here).

I'm reminded of how often the ocean has been employed to imagine great strife and sometimes even greater triumph in literature. Yet the sea can defy metaphors it so easily creates: it is more than a representation of life v death; there actually is a vast expanse between civilizations; crossing it, on any vessel, is still a heroic feat.

If anything, this trip showed me that no better testament of the ocean's power exists than its survivors, be they tortoises or kings.