Massive Multi-Thinker Online Review, that is. I think it should be about John Logie's new book, Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates, now available from Parlor Press. You can order it or download it for free as a PDF. The book has a Creative Commons license too. More about the book:

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates investigates the role of rhetoric in shaping public perceptions about a novel technology: peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. While broadband Internet services now allow speedy transfers of complex media files, Americans face real uncertainty about whether peer-to-peer file sharing is or should be legal. John Logie analyzes the public arguments growing out of more than five years of debate sparked by the advent of Napster, the first widely adopted peer-to-peer technology. The debate continues with the second wave of peer-to-peer file transfer utilities like Limewire, KaZaA, and BitTorrent. With Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion, Logie joins the likes of Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Jessica Litman, and James Boyle in the ongoing effort to challenge and change current copyright law so that it fulfills its purpose of fostering creativity and innovation while protecting the rights of artists in an attention economy.

Logie examines metaphoric frames—warfare, theft, piracy, sharing, and hacking, for example—that dominate the peer-to-peer debates and demonstrably shape public policy on the use and exchange of digital media. Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion identifies the Napster case as a failed opportunity for a productive national discussion on intellectual property rights and responsibilities in digital environments. Logie closes by examining the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the “Grokster” case, in which leading peer-to-peer companies were found to be actively inducing copyright infringement. The Grokster case, Logie contends, has already produced the chilling effects that will stifle the innovative spirit at the heart of the Internet and networked communities.

So what do you think? Want to do it? What's a date we can shoot for?

(Cross-posted at Kairosnews.)

Why don't they make commercials like these anymore?

and the greatest of all:

I wish I could find the "Baby Ruth...and Butterfinger: fresh, guaranteed" commercial and the cloyingly sentimental McDonalds "Little Sister" commercial. I should probably keep searching RetroJunk until I find it.

Expect more light blogging until around the end of the week...the battle of the holiday bulge, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, preparing for next semester's classes, and a few other business items demand my attention at the moment.

The following is a sort-of review of Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother. This is the sort of thing I post on my blog that tends to end up getting plagiarized for someone's assignment. It's so obvious from the referrers: people search for something like "essays julia alvarez in the time of the butterflies." Then, a while later, there come those searches for a sentence or two of my post in quotation marks. For those portions of my audience, then:

1. You really ought to read the book yourself. This you're about to read is my personal reaction to it. You may very well see something I didn't. Also, my book review may not touch on the content of your particular course. This will be a dead giveaway for your teacher. Finally, it offends me that you would take my name off this and put yours on. I put time and effort into reading the book and writing my review.

2. Glad you found the original source. Typing that sentence into Google and seeing that hit come up feels like a punch in the gut, I know.

Forgive that distraction, but I wanted my opinion to be right here in the post. My friend Darren has a similar note, but on the About page of his blog:

A special note to students: if you quote from this site—and judging by traffic statistics, The Woman Warrior, Benito Cereno, July's People, and Buried Child are popular choices—please cite it properly. Your teachers are not stupid.

On with the review...

Prior to this, I had read the following works by Kincaid: Annie John, Lucy, A Small Place, and At the Bottom of the River. I own My Brother and Mr. Potter and hope to read those when I get back home after the holidays.

I started reading Kincaid in college. A professor had assigned her short story "Girl" in a class, and I went out and got my hands on all the Kincaid I could. I did that all the time with other authors I liked. Do undergraduate students still do that? I would love to hear about it if they do. :-)

Whereas Annie John and Lucy are Bildungsromane, albeit with their own complexities about race, economics (Lucy is an au pair for a white family), and identity, Autobiography is on a par with A Small Place in its exploration of colonialism and its consequences.

The narrator, Xuela Claudette Richardson, has a father who is half Scottish, half African. Her father has wholly identified with his Scottish side; he is greedy and power-hungry. The narrator is sent to live with several different families, but for a time lives with her father and his new wife. The new wife gives birth to two children, a girl and a boy. Xuela has no friends, and she feels no love or affection for anyone, though she has several lovers; as a character she is shockingly empty, but she does have sympathy for the poor, "defeated" people around her in the aggregate and abstract. She is indifferent to her half-siblings until the boy dies of a terrible disease and the girl experiences an unwanted pregnancy (Xuela helps her terminate the pregnancy).

Xuela doesn't love anyone, and she doesn't want anyone to love her. The postcolonial condition of herself and others in her community coupled with the loss of her mother, a Carib woman, in childbirth cause Xuela to be utterly alienated from everyone. By that I mean that people in her country don't trust each other; as children, they are taught not to trust anyone, and they are trained to be ashamed of themselves -- their hair, skin color, and language ("proper English" and French or English patois are referenced several times. Xuela's stepmother speaks to her in patois as a sign of disrespect, for example).

Recurring themes include defeat, sex (and the absence of its attendant shame, and masturbation, and fascination with one's body), disappointment, silence (and its various characters), internalized misogyny (the women in the novel hate each other inexplicably), existential crisis. There's an example of that last one on page 202:

It is said that unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you. You are conceived; you are born: these things are true, how could they not be, but you don't know them; you only have to believe them, for there is no other explanation. You are a child and you find the world big and round and you have to find a place in it. How to do that is yet another mystery, and no one can tell you how exactly. You become a woman, a grown-up person. Against ample evidence, against your better judgment, you put trust in the constancy of things, you place faith in their everydayness. One day you open your door, you step out in your yard, but the ground is not there and you fall into a hole that has no bottom and no sides and no color. The mystery of the hole in the ground gives way to the mystery of your fall; just when you get used to falling and falling forever, you stop, and that stopping is yet another mystery, for why did you stop, there is not an answer to that any more than there is an answer to why you fell in the first place. Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you. And why not, why not!

Xuela also gives sensuous descriptions of landscapes and bodies, and she reflects at length on motherhood, mothering, and the absence of a mother. It was a great novel, and I recommend it.

Another passage from The Autobiography of My Mother (pp. 96-98):

I had never had a mother, I had just recently refused to become one, and I knew then that this refusal would be complete. I would never become a mother, but that would not be the same as never bearing children. I would bear children, but I would never be a mother to them. I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god. I would bear children in the morning, I would bathe them at noon in a water that came from myself, and I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole, all at once. They would live and then they would not live. In their day of life, I would walk them to the edge of a precipice. I would not push them over; I would not have to; the sweet voices of unusual pleasures would call to them from its bottom; they would not rest until they became one with these sounds. I would cover their bodies with diseases, embellish skins with thinly crusted sores, the sores sometimes oozing a thick pus for which they would thirst, a thirst that could never be quenched. I would condemn them to live in an empty space frozen in the same posture in which they had been born. I would throw them from a great height; every bone in their body would be broken and the bones would never be properly set, healing in the way they were broken, healing never at all. I would decorate them when they were only corpses and set each corpse in a polished wooden box, and place the polished wooden box in the earth and forget the part of the earth where I had buried the box. It is in this way that I did not become a mother; it is in this way that I bore my children.

The blurb on the cover of this book, written by Michiko Kakutani, says that it is "powerful and disturbing." I wouldn't say it's all that disturbing as a whole (yet), but this excerpt definitely stands out.

I never know which word to use: "toward" or "towards." For economy's sake, I prefer "toward," but I really just think consistency is in order. Say "forward," "backward," "upward," "downward," "toward," "westward," "eastward," etc., or put the "s" at the end of all of them.

Sigh..."towards" does win the Google fight, though.

I finished up the Joanna Russ book; it was okay. I'm now a good way into The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, and this gem looked nice. I'll probably end up teaching a grammar course in the near future; shall I require the students to diagram this sentence?

My world then -- silent, soft, and vegetable-like in its vulnerability, subject to the powerful whims of others, diurnal, beginning with the pale opening of light on the horizon each morning and ending with the sudden onset of dark at the beginning of each night -- was both a mystery to me and the source of much pleasure: I loved the face of a gray sky, porous, grainy, wet, following me to school for mornings on end, sending down on me soft arrows of water; the face of that same sky when it was a hard, unsheltering blue, a backdrop for a cruel sun; the harsh heat that eventually became a part of me, like my blood; the overbearing trees (the stems of some of them the size of small trunks) that grew without restraint, as if beauty were only size, and I could tell them all apart by closing my eyes and listening to the sound the leaves made when they rubbed together; and I loved that moment when the white flowers from the cedar tree started to fall to the ground with a silence that I could hear, their petals at first still fresh, a soft kiss of pink and white, then a day later, crushed, wilted, and brown, a nuisance to the eye; and the river that had become a small lagoon when one day on its own it changed course, on whose bank I would sit and watch families of birds, and frogs laying their eggs, and the sky turning from black to blue and blue to black, and rain falling on the sea beyond the lagoon but not on the mountain that was beyond the sea.