Non-GIP
What is Scully thinking? Help me caption this, win valuable prizes.
Also, lots of nonfiction reviews.
(For those of you looking for fan stuff, I am writing. I've just been having trouble sitting down with any one story.)
Peter D. Kramer, Should You Leave?: So, before you get all worried, I got this because he's the author of Listening to Prozac, and it was $1 at the amazing St. Agnes book sale. Kramer thinks he's more poetical than he is, but if you want a review of various post-Freudian theorists of intimacy, this isn't a bad book - assuming you don't mind being addressed as "you" with Kramer's conceit that a specific person is asking whether s/he should leave or stay in a relationship that has both benefits and detriments. The problem is, as Kramer admits, that you can't answer the question "should you leave?" without lots of other information, which by definition he doesn't have, so I'm not sure that this would work as the advice book it's supposed to be. As general pop psychology, though, it's inoffensive.
Jonathan Kellerman, Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children: I've read lots of Kellerman's mysteries, which often involve troubled and/or abused children. I didn't quite realize that Kellerman had such a conservative view of human nature, though. He's of the very strong opinion that some kids are just bad kids, and not much can be done to change them after age eleven or so. "Just bad" encompasses a lot of possible causes, from genetic to social to acquired (mostly by way of head injuries), and Kellerman doesn't argue that any one of those is the big culprit. Unfortunately, most of the book is Kellerman's reflections, as promised, rather than any systematic investigation, which limits the book's utility.
Kathryn Temple, Scandal Nation: Law and Authorship in Britain, 1750-1832: I don't know if Derrida gives bullshit a bad name, but I'm damn sure Kathryn Temple does. This book about various literary scandals in Britain suffers from elephantitis of the jargon, disguising (not very well) some pretty fuzzy thinking. Temple refuses to summarize the texts that she's discussing, meaning that you have to know the details of the works of Samuel Richardson, Ossian, Catherine Macaulay, and Mary Prince, respectively a fairly famous author of the eighteenth century, a made-up Scottish poet, one of the first well-known female historians, and a former slave involved in a libel trial. The only one who knows all that is Temple herself.
Failure to describe has consequences: for example, there's a chapter about Catherine Macaulay, who lost social status when she married a much younger man and sent a letter to her older mentor apparently apologizing for that, which the angry (jilted?) mentor then disseminated widely, turning Macaulay into a joke and a social pariah. Temple argues that, although copyright law protected men's private letters, as demonstrated by several contemporaneous lawsuits, the law didn't protect Macaulay's privacy because she was a woman. Now, what would you want to know to evaluate this claim? How about, did Macaulay sue anybody and lose, or did she decide not to sue? You won't find out from Temple. Another easy example: In one sentence, she says that one in forty people in Britain in the mid-1760s may have been black, and in the next she says that there were from three thousand to twenty thousand blacks in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Now consider that the population of Britain in the 1760s was about 6 million, and in 1800 about 12 million. The demographic shifts required for 1/40 at time 1 and 3,000-20,000 at time 2 are inconceivable. This is sloppy, and sloppiness makes me mistrust Temple's analysis as well as her facts.
We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are ChangingOur Culture, intro. by Rebecca Blood: The funniest thing about this book, published in 2002, is how few of the "key" weblogs it discusses I recognize: Boing Boing shows up a couple of times, and one mention of Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit. Some things date really fast. The contents are reasonably cute, and there's an interesting history of Kaycee Nicole, the made-up girl with cancer who "maintained" a weblog until she "died," but you can get better advice on blogging online.
Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution: I have a preference for sharp writing, sentences and phrases that make you pause and think, "That's well written." On the other hand, people who think they're damned clever tend to annoy me. Unfortunately, there's a correlation between flashy writing and being too clever by half. Poole generally stays on the flashy side in this light book about the social implications and pleasures of video games. Written from the perspective of a true fan, the book discusses how video games have evolved and what makes them good, with some nice observations along the way, specifically about the difference between interactivity as we see it in games and responses to other texts. Fan writers are responding to texts, and we can even call it interaction, but in a lot of ways it's more responsive, in the sense of being within the reader's control, than responses within a game, which are limited by the choices offered by the programmer. A nice light read for those who can tolerate worship of Lara Croft.
James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy: This video game article I'm writing has led me to some strange places. Gee is an enthusiastic gamer, which decreases his credibility somewhat even though he is a Professor of Reading in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Go Badgers!). Fortunately for you, I can give you the benefit of his wisdom quickly: Video games make learning how to play them fun; schools would do a better job if they were more like video games. On one level, this seems like a trivial point. Of course school would be better if it were more engaging, but it's not as if you can reward the learning of the times tables with an extra life or a banana, as in my beloved Ms. Pac-Man, and anyway it's far from clear that rewards are a good idea unless they're very closely tied to the subject. Gee's principles of learning may be a passionate rebuttal of the drill-and-kill techniques used in this age of multiple-choice testing, but they don't offer much in the way of specifics.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews: I picked this up because Telushkin's Jewish Literacy was helpful to me when I started trying to figure out what this Judaism stuff was all about; I was raised in a non-religious family and never went to temple. The cultural Judaism, though, I'm more familiar with, so the Jewish jokes were much less revelatory than the religious guidance. Telushkin has a different version of the basic Jewish joke - I learned it as "Two Jews, three opinions," but he has it three and three. He has a few interesting things to say about the relationship between jokes, oppression, and power, but there was nothing actively hilarious about the book. The jokes are a mix of general, sourceless jokes (like the ones with the priest, the pastor and the rabbi - the rabbi always gets the punchline) and bits from the schtick of Jewish humorists, like Woody Allen explaining that he doesn't want to achieve immortality through his work - he wants to achieve immortality through not dying. Maybe something to borrow from the library, if you like non-scandalous jokes and Yiddishisms; pretty kid-safe except for a discussion of the origins of "shiksa" and similar words for lo-yehudi.
Carol Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion: Tavris, whose The Mismeasure of Woman was a pretty fundamental feminist text for me in college, is a psychologist and a very clear writer. She doesn't think that anger is inherently bad - justified anger can push people to work for social change, or even just personal change. But she's not fond of the idea that it's good to express one's anger just to get the "truth" out or to "discharge" the negative emotion. To the contrary, she argues, expressing anger in uncontrolled ways - yelling, kicking the couch, etc. - reinforces the anger and makes communication more difficult, not to mention that what "clears the air" for one person often pollutes it for someone else, who's now hurt and angry him/herself. The book is a good overview of various social myths about and prototypes of anger, with a bit at the end on managing anger. I feel good that my occasional strategy of leaving to take a walk gets good marks from Tavris, though I've once or twice done it in such a theatrical way that it probably violates her standards for not trying to get rid of one's own anger by making other people angry.
Gina Kolata, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health: Kolata is a science reporter for the New York Times and an exercise fanatic. Nonetheless, her research reveals that exercise isn't beneficial in a linear manner - a little bit is really helpful for health, but a lot isn't much better than a little. Along the way to this conclusion, Kolata reviews some of the history of exercise in the US, from weightlifting to Spinning, and critiques the various certifications available for many kinds of fitness training; she concludes that many are little more than scams in which "trainers" get diplomas by mail, a process which might be thought to be worse in the case of physical training than for essays that might in theory be graded from across the country. (The trainers may be victimized by the process as well as the trainees, since they're charged large sums to maintain certifications but don't get much benefit from the "continuing education" for which they're required to pay.) Kolata also says that the runner's high is a myth, and that "muscle weighs more than fat, so you may be shaping up without losing weight" is probably untrue given the marginal changes in the body's composition that even serious weight training causes. We've got a lot of skeletal muscle to begin with, so it's really hard to make a big percentage change - and don’t get her started on "muscle takes more calories than fat to maintain," because "more" turns out to mean something like "twelve calories a day." The book is entertaining, but suffers from Kolata's training as a features writer; she can be repetitive, and the connections between the chapters are somewhat loose. Nonetheless, the book is a good example of a fan writing critically about her passion, keeping her commitments up-front without seeming overly biased - unlike the gamers discussed above.
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World: This is a great book by a hearing woman who grew up around deaf people, at a school for the deaf in New York where her parents worked. She gives a really interesting, sympathetic account of the Deaf community while still recognizing her outsider status. Her discussion of the syntax of ASL reminded me somewhat of one of the neat stories in Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others, about how language may shape thought. Cohen sets out the debates in the Deaf community about mainstreaming in education and cochlear implants by making the best possible case for all sides. All of the alternatives require some loss, of a distinct culture, of potentially good lives for deaf people (sometimes because they could find real power and success in a distinct community, sometimes because they would have many more options outside that community), of educational success for deaf children, and so on. The choices are painful - is giving your child a cochlear implant like giving him drugs so that he won't be gay? Isn't life easier for the hearing, and if so, how could a parent responsibly deny a child the options that being able to hear allows her? Cohen's book left me with a sense of the terrible complications of Deaf versus deaf as well as Deaf versus hearing.
Tony Perrottet, Route 66 A.D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists: The theme of this set seems to be books that meld personal histories with larger claims. In this case, Perrottet recounts how he and his wife followed the same tourist paths that wealthy Roman tourists did, albeit a lot faster, going back and forth between history and present-day travel writing. The present-day narrative is complicated by Perrottet's wife's pregnancy as well as Perrottet's dogged insistence on doing things the hard way - two things that don't go all that well together. He's a decent writer, and it's interesting to read about what life was like for a Roman citizen when all roads really did lead to Rome; he doesn't stint on describing the orgies and other naughty behaviors tourists could encounter.
David Sheff, Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children: Well, not exactly. Light on analysis and heavy on description, this book examines the personalities and business decisions behind everything from Donkey Kong to Tetris. Nintendo succeeded, in this telling, because (1) it chose good games, (2) it was willing to invest for the long term, as American companies weren't, especially after an earlier video game bubble collapsed, and (3) its head was ruthless in arranging contracts to its advantage, threatening retailers who dared to carry other product, and doing other things that are illegal in the US but apparently common practice in Japan (and not unknown in the US, though we pretend otherwise). The book does give support to those who claim that Japanese companies have an advantage in that Japan excludes foreign competitors, giving Japanese companies an impregnable home base - a sort of unsinkable aircraft carrier of business - so they can always ride out initial difficulties. At the same time, Japanese investors were willing to wait for Nintendo's products to catch on; an American company would have had its top management massacred years before Nintendo's strategies paid off with incredible profits. The book's now a decade out of date; Nintendo got slapped with a huge fine in Europe last year for the anticompetitive behavior described in the book, but it's appealing and nobody knows what will happen next. Sega, Sony and Microsoft have also eaten a lot more of Nintendo's lunch than Atari ever managed. Maybe the biggest lesson here is about all the companies that fell by the wayside: It's a bad idea to be the first mover. You sell people on the technology, but they end up buying from somebody else. I hope that the same thing doesn't happen to TiVo (I own some stock, even), but signs aren't promising.
Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination: After the disaster that was Kathryn Temple's book, I was prepared to dislike this English professor/nonlawyer's examination of several periods in the history of English and American copyright. But, underneath the clever writing - "copywrights," people who made copyright what it is today, get it? - there are some neat ideas. Saint-Amour traces the history of the defense of plagiarism, quite broadly defined as the theft of ideas and plots, and links it to the shift in economics from a labor theory of value to a theory grounded in consumer desires. Both plagiarism's defenders and the new economists located value not in the source but in the consumer; if a story had value to the readers, that was proof of its value and excuse for its "theft" by the plagiarist-author. He also discusses the Royal Copyright Commission hearings of 1876-78, where a system of overall compulsory licensing was seriously considered though ultimately rejected, the literary/property theories of Oscar Wilde, the length of the copyright term and its relation to the work of mourning the dead, and other intersections between literary theory and property law. The appendix of centos, poems composed entirely of lines taken from other poems, is fascinating reading all on its own, as a different kind of re-production than the fannish version that usually occupies me.
Also, lots of nonfiction reviews.
(For those of you looking for fan stuff, I am writing. I've just been having trouble sitting down with any one story.)
Peter D. Kramer, Should You Leave?: So, before you get all worried, I got this because he's the author of Listening to Prozac, and it was $1 at the amazing St. Agnes book sale. Kramer thinks he's more poetical than he is, but if you want a review of various post-Freudian theorists of intimacy, this isn't a bad book - assuming you don't mind being addressed as "you" with Kramer's conceit that a specific person is asking whether s/he should leave or stay in a relationship that has both benefits and detriments. The problem is, as Kramer admits, that you can't answer the question "should you leave?" without lots of other information, which by definition he doesn't have, so I'm not sure that this would work as the advice book it's supposed to be. As general pop psychology, though, it's inoffensive.
Jonathan Kellerman, Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children: I've read lots of Kellerman's mysteries, which often involve troubled and/or abused children. I didn't quite realize that Kellerman had such a conservative view of human nature, though. He's of the very strong opinion that some kids are just bad kids, and not much can be done to change them after age eleven or so. "Just bad" encompasses a lot of possible causes, from genetic to social to acquired (mostly by way of head injuries), and Kellerman doesn't argue that any one of those is the big culprit. Unfortunately, most of the book is Kellerman's reflections, as promised, rather than any systematic investigation, which limits the book's utility.
Kathryn Temple, Scandal Nation: Law and Authorship in Britain, 1750-1832: I don't know if Derrida gives bullshit a bad name, but I'm damn sure Kathryn Temple does. This book about various literary scandals in Britain suffers from elephantitis of the jargon, disguising (not very well) some pretty fuzzy thinking. Temple refuses to summarize the texts that she's discussing, meaning that you have to know the details of the works of Samuel Richardson, Ossian, Catherine Macaulay, and Mary Prince, respectively a fairly famous author of the eighteenth century, a made-up Scottish poet, one of the first well-known female historians, and a former slave involved in a libel trial. The only one who knows all that is Temple herself.
Failure to describe has consequences: for example, there's a chapter about Catherine Macaulay, who lost social status when she married a much younger man and sent a letter to her older mentor apparently apologizing for that, which the angry (jilted?) mentor then disseminated widely, turning Macaulay into a joke and a social pariah. Temple argues that, although copyright law protected men's private letters, as demonstrated by several contemporaneous lawsuits, the law didn't protect Macaulay's privacy because she was a woman. Now, what would you want to know to evaluate this claim? How about, did Macaulay sue anybody and lose, or did she decide not to sue? You won't find out from Temple. Another easy example: In one sentence, she says that one in forty people in Britain in the mid-1760s may have been black, and in the next she says that there were from three thousand to twenty thousand blacks in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Now consider that the population of Britain in the 1760s was about 6 million, and in 1800 about 12 million. The demographic shifts required for 1/40 at time 1 and 3,000-20,000 at time 2 are inconceivable. This is sloppy, and sloppiness makes me mistrust Temple's analysis as well as her facts.
We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are ChangingOur Culture, intro. by Rebecca Blood: The funniest thing about this book, published in 2002, is how few of the "key" weblogs it discusses I recognize: Boing Boing shows up a couple of times, and one mention of Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit. Some things date really fast. The contents are reasonably cute, and there's an interesting history of Kaycee Nicole, the made-up girl with cancer who "maintained" a weblog until she "died," but you can get better advice on blogging online.
Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution: I have a preference for sharp writing, sentences and phrases that make you pause and think, "That's well written." On the other hand, people who think they're damned clever tend to annoy me. Unfortunately, there's a correlation between flashy writing and being too clever by half. Poole generally stays on the flashy side in this light book about the social implications and pleasures of video games. Written from the perspective of a true fan, the book discusses how video games have evolved and what makes them good, with some nice observations along the way, specifically about the difference between interactivity as we see it in games and responses to other texts. Fan writers are responding to texts, and we can even call it interaction, but in a lot of ways it's more responsive, in the sense of being within the reader's control, than responses within a game, which are limited by the choices offered by the programmer. A nice light read for those who can tolerate worship of Lara Croft.
James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy: This video game article I'm writing has led me to some strange places. Gee is an enthusiastic gamer, which decreases his credibility somewhat even though he is a Professor of Reading in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Go Badgers!). Fortunately for you, I can give you the benefit of his wisdom quickly: Video games make learning how to play them fun; schools would do a better job if they were more like video games. On one level, this seems like a trivial point. Of course school would be better if it were more engaging, but it's not as if you can reward the learning of the times tables with an extra life or a banana, as in my beloved Ms. Pac-Man, and anyway it's far from clear that rewards are a good idea unless they're very closely tied to the subject. Gee's principles of learning may be a passionate rebuttal of the drill-and-kill techniques used in this age of multiple-choice testing, but they don't offer much in the way of specifics.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews: I picked this up because Telushkin's Jewish Literacy was helpful to me when I started trying to figure out what this Judaism stuff was all about; I was raised in a non-religious family and never went to temple. The cultural Judaism, though, I'm more familiar with, so the Jewish jokes were much less revelatory than the religious guidance. Telushkin has a different version of the basic Jewish joke - I learned it as "Two Jews, three opinions," but he has it three and three. He has a few interesting things to say about the relationship between jokes, oppression, and power, but there was nothing actively hilarious about the book. The jokes are a mix of general, sourceless jokes (like the ones with the priest, the pastor and the rabbi - the rabbi always gets the punchline) and bits from the schtick of Jewish humorists, like Woody Allen explaining that he doesn't want to achieve immortality through his work - he wants to achieve immortality through not dying. Maybe something to borrow from the library, if you like non-scandalous jokes and Yiddishisms; pretty kid-safe except for a discussion of the origins of "shiksa" and similar words for lo-yehudi.
Carol Tavris, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion: Tavris, whose The Mismeasure of Woman was a pretty fundamental feminist text for me in college, is a psychologist and a very clear writer. She doesn't think that anger is inherently bad - justified anger can push people to work for social change, or even just personal change. But she's not fond of the idea that it's good to express one's anger just to get the "truth" out or to "discharge" the negative emotion. To the contrary, she argues, expressing anger in uncontrolled ways - yelling, kicking the couch, etc. - reinforces the anger and makes communication more difficult, not to mention that what "clears the air" for one person often pollutes it for someone else, who's now hurt and angry him/herself. The book is a good overview of various social myths about and prototypes of anger, with a bit at the end on managing anger. I feel good that my occasional strategy of leaving to take a walk gets good marks from Tavris, though I've once or twice done it in such a theatrical way that it probably violates her standards for not trying to get rid of one's own anger by making other people angry.
Gina Kolata, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health: Kolata is a science reporter for the New York Times and an exercise fanatic. Nonetheless, her research reveals that exercise isn't beneficial in a linear manner - a little bit is really helpful for health, but a lot isn't much better than a little. Along the way to this conclusion, Kolata reviews some of the history of exercise in the US, from weightlifting to Spinning, and critiques the various certifications available for many kinds of fitness training; she concludes that many are little more than scams in which "trainers" get diplomas by mail, a process which might be thought to be worse in the case of physical training than for essays that might in theory be graded from across the country. (The trainers may be victimized by the process as well as the trainees, since they're charged large sums to maintain certifications but don't get much benefit from the "continuing education" for which they're required to pay.) Kolata also says that the runner's high is a myth, and that "muscle weighs more than fat, so you may be shaping up without losing weight" is probably untrue given the marginal changes in the body's composition that even serious weight training causes. We've got a lot of skeletal muscle to begin with, so it's really hard to make a big percentage change - and don’t get her started on "muscle takes more calories than fat to maintain," because "more" turns out to mean something like "twelve calories a day." The book is entertaining, but suffers from Kolata's training as a features writer; she can be repetitive, and the connections between the chapters are somewhat loose. Nonetheless, the book is a good example of a fan writing critically about her passion, keeping her commitments up-front without seeming overly biased - unlike the gamers discussed above.
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World: This is a great book by a hearing woman who grew up around deaf people, at a school for the deaf in New York where her parents worked. She gives a really interesting, sympathetic account of the Deaf community while still recognizing her outsider status. Her discussion of the syntax of ASL reminded me somewhat of one of the neat stories in Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others, about how language may shape thought. Cohen sets out the debates in the Deaf community about mainstreaming in education and cochlear implants by making the best possible case for all sides. All of the alternatives require some loss, of a distinct culture, of potentially good lives for deaf people (sometimes because they could find real power and success in a distinct community, sometimes because they would have many more options outside that community), of educational success for deaf children, and so on. The choices are painful - is giving your child a cochlear implant like giving him drugs so that he won't be gay? Isn't life easier for the hearing, and if so, how could a parent responsibly deny a child the options that being able to hear allows her? Cohen's book left me with a sense of the terrible complications of Deaf versus deaf as well as Deaf versus hearing.
Tony Perrottet, Route 66 A.D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists: The theme of this set seems to be books that meld personal histories with larger claims. In this case, Perrottet recounts how he and his wife followed the same tourist paths that wealthy Roman tourists did, albeit a lot faster, going back and forth between history and present-day travel writing. The present-day narrative is complicated by Perrottet's wife's pregnancy as well as Perrottet's dogged insistence on doing things the hard way - two things that don't go all that well together. He's a decent writer, and it's interesting to read about what life was like for a Roman citizen when all roads really did lead to Rome; he doesn't stint on describing the orgies and other naughty behaviors tourists could encounter.
David Sheff, Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children: Well, not exactly. Light on analysis and heavy on description, this book examines the personalities and business decisions behind everything from Donkey Kong to Tetris. Nintendo succeeded, in this telling, because (1) it chose good games, (2) it was willing to invest for the long term, as American companies weren't, especially after an earlier video game bubble collapsed, and (3) its head was ruthless in arranging contracts to its advantage, threatening retailers who dared to carry other product, and doing other things that are illegal in the US but apparently common practice in Japan (and not unknown in the US, though we pretend otherwise). The book does give support to those who claim that Japanese companies have an advantage in that Japan excludes foreign competitors, giving Japanese companies an impregnable home base - a sort of unsinkable aircraft carrier of business - so they can always ride out initial difficulties. At the same time, Japanese investors were willing to wait for Nintendo's products to catch on; an American company would have had its top management massacred years before Nintendo's strategies paid off with incredible profits. The book's now a decade out of date; Nintendo got slapped with a huge fine in Europe last year for the anticompetitive behavior described in the book, but it's appealing and nobody knows what will happen next. Sega, Sony and Microsoft have also eaten a lot more of Nintendo's lunch than Atari ever managed. Maybe the biggest lesson here is about all the companies that fell by the wayside: It's a bad idea to be the first mover. You sell people on the technology, but they end up buying from somebody else. I hope that the same thing doesn't happen to TiVo (I own some stock, even), but signs aren't promising.
Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination: After the disaster that was Kathryn Temple's book, I was prepared to dislike this English professor/nonlawyer's examination of several periods in the history of English and American copyright. But, underneath the clever writing - "copywrights," people who made copyright what it is today, get it? - there are some neat ideas. Saint-Amour traces the history of the defense of plagiarism, quite broadly defined as the theft of ideas and plots, and links it to the shift in economics from a labor theory of value to a theory grounded in consumer desires. Both plagiarism's defenders and the new economists located value not in the source but in the consumer; if a story had value to the readers, that was proof of its value and excuse for its "theft" by the plagiarist-author. He also discusses the Royal Copyright Commission hearings of 1876-78, where a system of overall compulsory licensing was seriously considered though ultimately rejected, the literary/property theories of Oscar Wilde, the length of the copyright term and its relation to the work of mourning the dead, and other intersections between literary theory and property law. The appendix of centos, poems composed entirely of lines taken from other poems, is fascinating reading all on its own, as a different kind of re-production than the fannish version that usually occupies me.