[ilds] M.G. Vassanji into Tunc

[Bruce Redwine]

That’s “one year before Tunc is published!”

Bruce



> On May 13, 2016, at 9:59 AM, Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> James,
> 
> Re “mining” of personal data for purposes of advertising, this doesn’t bother at all.  It does my wife, however, who’s a lawyer and who zealously guards her privacy.  We argue about this (lawyers like to argue!).  The materials on Academia.edu <http://academia.edu/> are uploaded by the authors, who presumably hold their own copyright, so those papers are subject to “fair use.”  Some journals (e.g., Mosaic) keep the copyright of its articles, and those would not appear for downloading.  I was unaware that an article was worth “a couple of thousand dollars.”  I’ll take your word for it, but this seems to me unlikely.  Basically I’m all for Open Access and realize that few things are free, so I’m quite willing to pay something reasonable for the privilege of access.
> 
> Your analogy between Internet strategies to make money and the policies of “the firm” in Tunc is provocative.  That is certainly one way to look at the novel.  I look at it in terms of Durrell’s long-term concerns/obsessions (Charlock/Sherlock “Holmes” the investigator into the nature of things) and the biographical fact that Claude-Marie Vincendon (to whom the novel is dedicated) dies on 1 January 1967, one year after Tunc is published.  Her presence pervades the book, in my opinion.
> 
> One thing about Tunc bothers me.  Durrell is the writer of “the spirit of place.”  He is most famous for the landscapes he knew first hand.  So, why do we spend time in Istanbul or “the Polis” or “Stamboul,” a place he never visited (if I’m correct)?  Does this account for the novel as “science fiction?”  Imagined realities?  The descriptions of the Golden Horn are quite ravishing, much as we expect from Durrell, but these are purely invented.  That bothers me.
> 
> Bruce
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On May 13, 2016, at 8:17 AM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com <mailto:james.d.gifford at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Bruce,
>> 
>> Since we're moving into /Tunc/ and the Firm, I think it's worth dwelling on this just a bit...
>> 
>> Academia.edu <http://academia.edu/> is useful, but it also comes with two limitations: copyright and revenue.  It's a for profit organization beholden to its investors to develop a revenue stream through advertising and data mining, meaning it tracks you, just like Google or Facebook.  Notice that you need to create a profile in order to download anything that others have uploaded and given away for "free."
>> 
>> That might not seem like much, but like email or Facebook, whenever one logs in, it records your IP address (just like you have in your email header).  The IP is a unique identifier for your device and how it's accessing the internet -- one might login to Gmail to check correspondence and then logout, but the IP has been recorded.  From that point forward, anywhere that IP address goes that accesses resources through Google (search terms, websites that rely on Google Adwords, etc.), Google creates a record for that IP address.  For instance, if you look to my email header (by default, it's not displayed by your email application, but that doesn't mean it isn't there), it will tell you I'm writing this email in Thunderbird use Shaw as my internet service provider, and have an IP address on Old Yale Road in Surrey, British Columbia.  It will even tell you the city block I'm on. Thereby, we generate an excellent record of our tastes and interests that can be valuable for marketing purposes.  Ditto for Facebook.  When the product is "free," the product is really you.
>> 
>> Academia.edu <http://academia.edu/> is part of that process, and it's also not immune to copyright -- the contract for academic publications very often transfers copyright to the publisher rather than the author, in many cases specifically to prohibit distribution outside of the paywall.  It's an oddity that academics often work in non-profit or public environments and compete for public funding to produce work intended for public consumption and the public good yet for purposes of tenure or promotion are compelled to publish their work in a way to assigns all rights to for-profit private enterprise.  One can now even "buy" Open Access for one's own publications, which really means paying the anticipated revenues: evidently an articles is worth a couple thousand dollars these days...  The requirement for Open Access for publicly-funded research in the UK is diverting a larger share of public research funding into paying those fees rather than driving academics to publish through Open Access resources.
>> 
>> One of the reasons the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism is interesting is that the metadata has been specifically held for an Open Access project in Linked Modernisms.
>> 
>> The Firm could have thought of no better model.  The content is user-generated but owned by the Firm, the user is the product up for sale or rented out for metadata, and people will even pay to get it!
>> 
>> All best,
>> James
>> 
>> On 2016-05-13 6:53 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
>>> James,
>>> 
>>> Thanks for the links.  That’s helpful.  The “open access” (OA) movement
>>> is indeed growing, particularly in areas like Classics but not so much
>>> in English literature.  I’ll mention one other source:  Academia.edu <http://academia.edu/>
>>> <http://academia.edu <http://academia.edu/>>, which is not restricted to “academics” but
>>> includes anyone who wants to sign into the database and provide a
>>> “profile” or entry.  It’s free.  That platform enables one to upload
>>> his/her publications or whatever and make them freely available to all
>>> and sundry.  I’ll note that Donald Kaczvinsky has an entry (search under
>>> his name) and has made his article, “Memlik’s House and Mountolive’s
>>> Uniform:  Orientalism, Ornamentalism, and /The Alexandria Quartet,”/
>>> available for downloading.  Vassanji does not have any papers available.
>>> 
>>> Bruce
> 
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