I did a live video-chat with some enterprising high-school freshmen at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, CO, a cabal of enterprising kids who are lobbying the school-system to add Little Brother to the statewide curriculum (!). We had a great chat — they’re really bright and lovely kids and clearly passionate and engaged!
Monthly Archives::
May 2009
Here’s part twenty of my reading of my 2005 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of participating in the closing panel at the Convention on Modern Liberty with Billy Bragg, Lisa Appignanesi, Feargal Sharkey, Paul Gilroy and Henry Porter. The Convention was a whole-day event with artists, activists, scholars, Parliamentarians, regulators, teachers, cryptographers and others. On the closing panel, we were asked to give closing thoughts on the event — I talked about the fact that British authoritarians have promised us security in exchange for taking away our liberty, but have not delivered; we’ve lost our freedom and been made less secure.
The Convention’s just uploaded the videos from the event, and I really enjoyed watching it from the other side of the stage, especially Billy Bragg’s talk. The last question — “What has moved our rights forward?” — was especially good.
Rolling Stone Argentina has a great interview with me about copyright, conducted by Ignacio Román.
Bueno, muchos músicos están despertando. Quizá no les guste lo que está pasando con Internet, porque durante toda su carrera les llenaron la cabeza diciéndoles “no te dejes copiar”. Pero de ahí a ir en contra de sus propios fanáticos… En Estados Unidos, miles de personas fueron enjuiciadas, pero esas ganancias no fueron para los creadores. El artista promedio quiere ser recordado como el tipo con el que sus fans perdieron la virginidad, no como el tipo con el que sus fans perdieron el disco rígido. Es terrible que cada vez que pienses en, por ejemplo, Tom Waits, digas: “Por culpa de ese tarado perdí mi tesis de diez años que estaba en el mismo rígido que su álbum”.
I shot a long video for the upcoming EU/Schoolnet event in Rome — they’ve started putting pieces of it online. Here’s me talking about “sexting,” media literacy and hysteria.
Bruce M Campbell created a lovely alternative PDF of Little Brother:
I took the HTML version, ran some type-cleaning things on it, and restyled it using, of all things, Apple’s Pages 8. I thought about using Adobe InDesign, but as my intention was to produce this as a PDF, thought that ID would be over-kill.
I’ve styled it as I thought it appropriate to the subject matter and the fonts I have on my system.
I’ve used Rockwell for the the Chapter titles and heads as I think the sardonicness of the “All-American” feel covers the “on-message” hypocrisy of the overall government policy here, and Minion Pro for the body, because I think it’s a very readable font, and the innate typography, especially with the punctuation characters, makes it disappear for the reader. For novelty, I’ve used Orator for the IM texts, and ITC AMerican Typewriter for the literary extracts.
Today I found myself surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of enthusiastic, high-school age readers from the Ontario school system, and was honoured to receive a popular award for best Canadian young adult novel of 2008. The award was the White Pine, part of the Ontario Library Association’s “Forest of Reading” program — librarians nominate ten books in each of several age-divided categories and students from across the province are encouraged to read all ten on the roster and vote for their favourite.
All in all, 250,000 students participate in Forest of Reading, and over 8,000 were in attendance today for the awards ceremony at Harbourfront in Toronto. I was mobbed by group after group of vibrant, intelligent, engaged students, passionate readers who wanted to talk about my book and the other books they’d enjoyed (the other nine nominees were all very good, and the authors were fascinating people).
To top it all off, I was delighted to discover that Little Brother won the White Pine award, making it the popular choice for best YA book among Ontario’s high-school students. I could not be more delighted!
Today I found myself surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of enthusiastic, high-school age readers from the Ontario school system, and was honoured to receive a popular award for best Canadian young adult novel of 2008. The award was the White Pine, part of the Ontario Library Association’s “Forest of Reading” program — librarians nominate ten books in each of several age-divided categories and students from across the province are encouraged to read all ten on the roster and vote for their favourite.
All in all, 250,000 students participate in Forest of Reading, and over 8,000 were in attendance today for the awards ceremony at Harbourfront in Toronto. I was mobbed by group after group of vibrant, intelligent, engaged students, passionate readers who wanted to talk about my book and the other books they’d enjoyed (the other nine nominees were all very good, and the authors were fascinating people).
To top it all off, I was delighted to discover that Little Brother won the White Pine award, making it the popular choice for best YA book among Ontario’s high-school students. I could not be more delighted!
In my latest Guardian column, “When love is harder to show than hate,” I look at the fact that copyright protects critics who want to talk trash about creative works, but gives no real protection to people who want to say nice things about them.
The damage here is twofold: first, this privileges creativity that knocks things down over things that build things up. The privilege is real: in the 21st century, we all rely on many intermediaries for the publication of our works, whether it’s YouTube, a university web server, or a traditional publisher or film company. When faced with legal threats arising from our work, these entities know that they’ve got a much stronger case if the work in question is critical than if it is celebratory. In the digital era, our creations have a much better chance of surviving the internet’s normal background radiation of legal threats if you leave the adulation out and focus on the criticism. This is a selective force in the internet’s media ecology: if you want to start a company that lets users remix TV shows, you’ll find it easier to raise capital if the focus is on taking the piss rather than glorifying the programmes.
Second, this perverse system acts as a censor of genuine upwellings of creativity that are worthy in their own right, merely because they are inspired by another work. It’s in the nature of beloved works that they become ingrained in our thinking, become part of our creative shorthand, and become part of our visual vocabulary. It’s no surprise, then, that audiences are moved to animate the characters that have taken up residence in their heads after reading our books and seeing our movies. The celebrated American science-fiction writer Steven Brust produced a fantastic, full-length novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, inspired by the television show Firefly. Brust didn’t – and probably can’t – receive any money for this work, but he wrote it anyway, because, he says, “I couldn’t help myself”.
