Busyness as Usual

At the beginning of the semester I have everything to do. And right now, a week in, is when it hits me: until December, I won't not be busy. Every second of every day, I've got something to do—something I could be doing. As I write this, I could be grading essays or working on my conference paper or finishing my gradebook or preparing for next week's classes or smoothing out Blackboard.

I'm wasting my time writing all this.

But no, I'm not. It's not because it's almost 2 am and past time when I can competently grade. It's not because this is a form of mental work and mental work is good. It's not so I can build up a body of blog posts or even for me to look back on when I'm feeling the squeeze at the first of next semester or next year.

I'm doing this because I want to, because I find it rewarding. Writing down my thoughts makes me feel good, right now, and feeling good, though it is a tautology, *makes me feel good*.

I'm not getting behind every second I sleep instead of grade. I'm not getting behind every time I watch an episode of Doctor Who instead of grade. I'll get my work done, but what makes me good at my job—if I am—is that I am human, and being human means caring about stuff, doing things because they make me feel good.

It also means not watching *another* episode of Doctor Who, or fussing with my gradebook instead of grading essays, let alone checking Twitter again. Tomorrow, I need to grade a bunch of essays. And really, I'll enjoy it, and feel better with it done than I did before. And then I'll work some more.

But right now, I wanted this time to write.

Adventures and Quests

One of the things that regularly irks me is the use of the word “adventure” in general culture, and roleplaying culture in particular. Yes, as a descriptivist, I admit that definitions change and that they’re ad hoc at best: if people at large use a word to mean X when I alone think it means Y, I’m wrong and they’re right, because words are not eternal, but only for shared meaning. Still. The original idea for adventure was caught up in the idea of randomness: it’s from the French  aventure, or “at random” or “by chance.” A knight on the Platonic ideal of an adventure mounts his horse and goads him on without touching the reins. Whatever happens, happens, and he surrenders control over the situation. When a person sets off on an adventure, he’s saying from the outset, “I have no idea what’s going to happen. In fact, I’m planning to make sure.”

By stark contrast, questing has a purpose. The most famous quest literature affords us, the quest for the Grail, has a set beginning, middle, and end. While an adventure is a serial story, a quest has the beginnings of something greater: a plot.

Both have their advantages, but again, I want to turn my attention to words and definitions, because I believe that this differentiation between adventure and quest—the de-synonymization—doesn’t limit us, but instead opens up our expression. Did you have a plan that turned out differently? That quest became an adventure. Did you just do whatever came into your head, only later realizing that it all linked together and set up a conclusion, not just an end? That adventure turned into a quest.

Through this terminology, we can even describe many smaller quests as part of a larger adventure through life, or many episodic adventures as part of a greater destined quest. When a person organizes a game (such as my friend Ian has been theorizing about), differentiating between the two is helpful. After all, if you want to set off into the unknown, or if you want to pursue a set goal, isn't it nice that we have specific words to mean each concept?

On Stealing Ideas

I like art and literature, and therefore I also like remixes and adaptation. I've been hearing a lot of Picasso's T.S. Eliot's "good artists borrow, great artists steal" maxim. Also, I've been teaching Milton, who in Paradise Lost not only adapted Genesis but also blatantly stole from Ariosto.

The problem with that quote is that "borrow" seems good, and "steal" seems bad. The quote makes it sound as if the True Geniuses of Mankind are all jerks, and that only by being jerks can they exert their Geniusness.

That's missing the point entirely. Stealing ideas is better than borrowing ideas. If I borrow a book, I have to give it back. If I steal a book, it's mine. However, like Cory Doctorow on "buying" licenses to DRM'd digital works vs stealing those digital works—the one you steal will never get arbitrarily deleted if the DRM company goes bankrupt—borrowing and stealing ideas is different. Contrary to public opinion, there is no shortage on ideas. There is no idea deficit. Ideas come out of the ether, they sublime from books and movies and human interactions. They just pop in your head and you can't control them. That's ideas for you. If I use your idea, you aren't suddenly without it any more. No, now we both have it. Ideas are not zero-sum.

So how do "borrow" and "steal" even apply? OK, here we go. If I "borrow" an idea, just like when I borrow a book, I know in every waking moment that it's not mine. It's not a part of me, and I'll be very careful around it because I see it chained to someone else. Whenever I talk about that idea, I'll reference someone else not simply to preserve attribution and good faith and all that, but because I'm uneasy around that idea. It's not mine, in the same way that to me a given funny story will never be mine, but always my father's. If I tell my daughter, though, she'll assume it's mine unless I tell her where it came from. I do that now, with my students. I tell them where I get a lot of stuff, because I'm uncomfortable claiming any (fleeting, transitory, meaningless) honor of "I came up with that."

When I get beyond that, if I get beyond that—when I realize that ideas and apothegms and proverbs and metaphors are just floating around, I can get it and use it. That's not your book, that's my book—I borrowed it years ago, but I've possessed it ten times as long as you did, and it has my notes in it and it's been a major part of my life, not yours. Those creases in the spine are mine, not yours. If you want it back, my duty is not to return it but to buy you another copy.

This works not only horizontally across friendship, but vertically, across generations. I have some books that are mine that used to be my dad's. They're mine in a way they never were his. He gave me ideas that live in my head, ideas that he tossed off one day that will stick with me forever. In a sense, I've stolen myself from him. I was his son, and now I'm my own man. In a non-zero-sum world, relationships don't change, information doesn't abandon its source—it just finds a new place. If I steal it, I make that place a home.

Preamble: On Writing, Being Read, and Copyright

My first question to the world: I have no idea what I should do about licensing. Here I plan to write essays on literature, religion, teaching, and other subjects, as well as post my translations of Old English poetry, and I am torn between two principles, and, of course, sub-principles. First I do not want to lend my thoughts to anyone without remuneration, but I know this is selfish. The opposite of course is to give everything I have away freely, but in this too is a little madness--do I disdain myself to the point where I am content as an unknown, writing anonymously and wishing to always be known as such? I do not wish to be anonymous completely, and though it is my pride that tells me this, I listen, knowing that there is sometimes wisdom in dark things. I accept that pride is what motivates me to write, to suggest to the world that a thing that I produce is worth the time to notice, and so I accept the prideful nature of wanting credit, although I deny the idea that credit is due at all points. I ask, but do not demand, because I believe, even if I do not at all times adhere to it, in a polite society, where "demand" is a foreign word when applied anywhere but to the inward self.

But still, I desire first of all things that what I write be read, and what I admire be admired in turn. As my desire is to translate Anglo-Saxon poetry, I find my root belief is in the quality, the originality, the goodness, of Anglo-Saxon poetry. That it cannot be easily read by an audience over a thousand years linguistically removed proves a problem, so I wish to translate it so that it can be read, enjoyed, and savored. I want to make it as easy to find and read as possible--not simple, but as far from inaccessible as can be done. This means that I wish to translate into a modern, contemporary language (although not necessarily a contemporary idiom), but that even more I desire my translation to be easily disseminated. As such, I lean towards Public Domain, which is about as free as free gets, copyright-wise. If I publish on the web in Public Domain, theoretically Dover Thrift, Barnes & Noble books, and even you (if you own a publishing company) could publish what I wrote and not give me one fat nickel, and be legally fine.

So what do I ask? What are the guidelines of this post, and of others on this blog? My authorial mandate is truth and my authorial request is to be recognized. I ask that anything I post be regarded as All Rights Reserved, in accordance with U.S. law, until I note otherwise. I plan that any translations that I produce be a lesser license, possibly even fully Public Domain, but I will note as such in each entry in the header. For now, the bracketed ARR represents that this entry is All Rights Reserved, and any post marked PD will be immediately and permanently public domain.

[6-24-2009 edit--I'm going to rescind on this and remove the bracketed ARR from the title--titles are too serenely simple to muddy with such nonsense. I'll instead use...]
--All Rights Reserved