As I mentioned, earlier this week, I attended a Creative Commons conference at QUT in Brisbane, including the launch of the Creative Commons licence for Australia. The main speaker was Larry Lessig, who gave two papers and joined a panel discussion as well. Lessig is a great speaker with really effective presentations, a point on which I hope to post more later. There was a lot of food for thought, and I’ll start with the opening presentations

In this talk, the central idea was remix, taking bits and pieces from the existing culture and recombining them to produce something new. My summary of the core argument

1. text is the past, video and audio are the future
2. the set of rights surrounding text has always allowed for a lot of remix, including direct copying for fair use, parody and so on
3. because of digital rights management technology and strong IP, the current trend is to suppress remix for video and audio, thereby depriving our culture of one of its historic sources of validity

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I mentioned a while back that I was reading Iron Council by China Mieville as part of a mini-seminar being run at Crooked Timber. The discussion is going to open up on Tuesday (US time, I guess) and I’d encourage any interested readers here to participate. Anyone who wants to link should check back here or at CT then.

There will be review essays from Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Matt Cheney, Henry Farrell, John Holbo, Belle Waring and me, with a response by China himself, and then comments from anyone who cares to make them. This is a bit (a long way, actually) out of my area of expertise, but I really wanted to be part of this venture, which I think has the potential to push the limits of the weblog form a bit further, and I have very much enjoyed Mieville’s work.

Update 12/1/4 The seminar is online. Go over and join the discussion

I’ve been reading a lot of different things lately, and might write a few reviews over the Christmas break. I just finished
“Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

a sort of historical fantasy set amid the great scientific discoveries and political turmoil of the late 17th century.

It’s great fun, with a great evocation of the period and plenty of sly digs at the modern reader (I liked the Duke of Monmouth as the Dan Quayle of the 1685 campaign). At the same time, I can’t help feeling I’ve completely missed the point here. As I said, the style is that of fantasy, but the novel seems to be entirely historically accurate apart from the fact that the members of the Cabal have been replaced by new characters with the same acronym, some of whom play a minor role in the story, and that one of the key characters comes from the island of Qwghlm[1], apparently a British possession[2].

I don’t know exactly what gives here: maybe a reader can point me in the right direction. A lot of readers had much the same reaction to “Jonathan Strange which I loved.

There’s a whole Metaweb (a type of wiki apparently) about all this, which may be worth exploring.

In a completely different department, I’ve been watching the Slim Dusty memorial concert which my wife taped. Although he’s normally pigeonholed as country, a lot of his songs (particularly the early ones) appeal to folkies like me. In the free assocation department, I notice that another crossover performer, Ted Egan, is now Administrator of the Northern Territory Well done!

Moving on to sporting news, karate training has finished for the year, with the traditional 1000-punch workout. Very cathartic! If you’re in Brisbane, and want to study karate in traditional style, with a genuine master of the art, Seiyushin is for you. Also, we went last night to see the Bullets go down by one point against the Sydney Kings. It’s a great night out, taking the ferry down the river to Southbank for dinner, going on to the game and home again by ferry, but it would have been perfect if only one more shot had rolled in instead of rimming out.

fn1. Given my Manx heritage, the idea that Qwghlm is the Isle of Man seems appealing. Certainly the name has a certain resonance, though its disemvowellment makes it hard to interpret.

fn2. I don’t claim to be an expert on 17th century history, so there may be some other things I’ve missed.

Prompted by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, who’s had more to say on the topic recently, I’ve been reading, and reviewing, Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. My review is over the fold. Comments appreciated.
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The Scar by China Mieville. Slightly out of order as I read Iron Council first, so I could write a review as part of a mini-symposium that will be held at Crooked Timber Real Soon Now. This is quite an exciting venture for me, both as something relatively new in blogging and as my first move into full-length fiction reviewing.

Coming back to The Scar, I found it, in many ways, the most enjoyable of Mieville’s books considered purely as speculative fiction. There’s something about sea voyages[1] that works really well in this context and Mieville characteristically takes it to the limit with the idea of a giant floating city. And given that much of my work lately has dealt with issues of possibility and probability, I particularly liked the Possible Sword. On the other hand, I missed the political and social layers of the books set in New Crobuzon.

fn1. When I was young, I really loved CS Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, for example, and of course most of space fiction is in this genre.

In broad terms, we know what the outcome of industrial relations reform will be. Although we haven’t had radical shifts in formal institutions, we’ve experienced a decisive shift of power to employers, and seen the results. The most obvious is polarization in working hours. There’s been a big increase in the proportion of people working more than 50 hours a week, and also a big increase in the proportion of part-time and casual workers. I think it’s self-evident that this is a bad thing, but I’ll spell out my reasons (probably over several posts).

I’ll start by observing that long hours suit some people, and so do part-time jobs. I suppose I would be the paradigm case of someone for whom long hours are not a problem. I have almost complete flexibility over the hours that I work, and almost complete autonomy over what I do from day to day, and the job is what I love doing, to the extent that there isn’t really a clear divide for me between working and not working (is writing this post at 7am work, or free time – I don’t really know). Part of the problem is that bosses’ jobs are mostly like mine – not quite as autonomous and flexible as mine perhaps, but with plenty of on-the-job rewards. As a result, bosses have always been more likely to work long hours than others. One problem with IR reform is that bosses get to impose their preferences on others, and those preferences are almost always for more effort, regardless of whether this is economically efficient or even in the long-term interest of the enterprise.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

This is a great first novel, set in England during the Napoleonic wars, but with an alternate history in which magic was practiced until the relatively recent past, and is, as the book opens, a respectable topic of theoretical study for the upper-middle classes. This cosy arrangement is upset by the arrival of first one, and then a second, real practical magician. The result is a mixture of fairy story, historical novel and academic tome (the footnotes alone are well worth the admission price) with a total effect that is entirely new. The main action, involving the eponymous magicians, is great fun, and the subplots, which have the sinister edge of all good fairy stories, are even better.

After looking at the reviews on Amazon, I think one thing is clear. If you loved the Harry Potter books, you probably won’t like Jonathan Strange. If like me, you found Harry a pleasant read, but want something more than a readable mass-market kids book then this might be the book for you. Where Harry is Billy Bunter + magic, this is something more like Jane Austen+magic.

You can get it from your local bookshop in both black-on-white and white-on-black versions. For those who like ordering from Amazon, here’s a link or click on the picture above. This is part of Amazon’s associate program, under which I get a miniscule cut, marking my first tentative venture into blog commercialisation. I believe some people have made enough out of this to afford to buy a book for themselves.