Best of the Transparent Hummingbird
apart from the sayerses, which do both,
the books i reread compulsively, my comfort books, are entirely different from the ones that have
and some of the books that were life changing for me i’ve read only once. then my life changed. so i didn’t read them anymore.
I started college planning to be an Anthropology and Philosophy double major but within one semester I was back to English literature, and willy-nilly, Med-Ren at that. At that time my reading was still primarily Anglophone. (Well obviously Sinophone too, but we’re talking only about American colleges.)
There were more requirements , so I thought
Second year came around: I was toying with the idea of being a Medievalist. To be a Medievalist you needed the Latin, so I went and got myself a Classics department course catalogue. To get a Latin minor you needed six semesters of Latin, one year of Elementary Greek, one semester each of Roman and Greek Civilisational History, and one course in Roman or Greek literature. I had just barely enough time to fit that in with my English major. On the first day the
The professor came in and he was holding Ransmayr. I could not resist the subtitle: “with an Ovidian Repertory?” I went and bought a copy. The same summer I discovered Roberto Calasso. WHAM I discovered Roberto Calasso. WHAM. intellectual punch to the solar plexus. And at the same time I was reading Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World with an Ovidian Repertory and Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story + In the Dutch Mountains
(I got through quite a lot of Plato and Xenophon but after one semester of Herodotus I decided that was quite enough Greek and I would read him in English) ( I had to sit through quite a lot of the De Bello Gallico before I could get to the Virgil, and I don’t mind telling you ancient warfare bores me to tears.)
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children’s literature, myth and fairy tales, riddles,
i am not against trademark, copyright and patents AT ALL. but i think it has to be balanced against the public interest matters: freedom of expression in parodies and in artistic works and other creative riffs on a trademark. freedom of access and information in relation to intellectual products.
if you’ve produced art work, why shuld someone else be able to use your material, without attribution and in a commercial enterprise? if you’ve written a bestseller, why shouldn’t you be entitled to be paid for the book and to object to pirated copies? it is a human right that you own intellectual output is protected, that you have property over your own creations.
if you are a drug company and drug tests are astronomically expnesive, why can’t you patent your medicines — you have an economic right to recoup your investments or who would do research?
we will be able to provide long term assistance by following through with the same litigant and attend hearings with them, take notes for them during the hearings, explain what is going on. if they qualify for full legal assistance, we will accompany them to legal clinics to seek advice and also record and explain the advice to them. and when the matter goes to trial, we will help them organise their case and ensure they have filed
we will attend hearings with the litigants, the problem is not legal but economic. why should developing countries pay so much how can developing countires have the same access –
for patented medication of freedom of speech and information
Dorothy Sayers - Gaudy Night + Busman’s Honeymoon (still for several of us (Tsinyen, Vaughn)
Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story + In the Dutch Mountains: They made me attempt to change my major (too late) and to switch my field to primarily European than Anglophone Christoph Ransmayr - Ovidian Repertory and AS Byatt’s Possession - it spoke to me at a time Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch (apparently at MIT they make them read this in political theory to teach them about revolution) and Thud — all of my pratchetts are comfort books rather
Malory Towers series. When i was in primary school all my early stories were somehow ripoffs and fanfics of english boarding school stories