Alan Jacobs

I look like I’m singing “Old Man River.”

Now that Apple has announced its next-generation AirPods, I see that I can get a charging pad that will charge the charging case that will charge the earbuds that allow me to play audio on my phone.

It seems to me that we’ve reached a point in consumer electronics at which the cost/benefit ratios are all out of whack. Indeed it is convenient to have wireless earbuds — or it would be if the number of devices that need charging weren’t proliferating. Moreover, the battery life of the AirPods is continually declining, something that can be “fixed” only by buying another set of AirPods. I don’t like the tradeoffs here. When I use my wired earbuds, it’s true that I have to deal with the wire, but it’s also true that they always work. They work on a wide range of devices, and they don’t decline in usability over time. (Though by eliminating the headphone jack from their phones Apple has made it more difficult for people to have one set of [wired] headphones to use in every situation. Which I think is an asshole move.)

Or consider wireless charging of phones: It sounds cool, but because the charging is so slow experts recommend that you keep a wired charger around for when you’re in a hurry. Or, alternatively, you could just not buy a wireless charger and accept the additional eight-tenths of a second it takes to plug your phone into a cord.

A similar logic applies to the “smart home”: when I finally thought about the amount of time that I have spent trying to get smart lightbulbs to work, and then trying to get them up and running again after a power outage, I realized that the infinitesimal savings of time and energy they provided made them a net drain on my life. Get up and flip a switch on the wall! It’s not hard!

And now I’m reading about people who are struggling with the inability to reboot their shoes. It’s not that these products don’t offer benefits, but that the benefits are tiny in comparison to the investment of time/energy/money that you have to make in order to get them and keep them working. I think I’l continue to opt out of most of them.

Let me expand on something I wrote in yesterday’s post: Copyright law is not relevant to the legal situation of Francis Spufford’s new Narnia novel. What matters is trademark law.

To illustrate: Many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books, including many of his Tarzan books, are now in the public domain. But people are not publishing Tarzan novels. Why not? Because Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. has trademarked “Tarzan” (and several other names) and will sue your pants off if you try to publish a Tarzan book without paying them what they think it’s worth.

Fifteen years from now copyright will expire on C. S. Lewis’s Narnia novels and they will come into the public domain. At that point anyone will be able to publish them, just as anyone today can publish a Charles Dickens novel. People will be able to edit and adapt them, making Susan Queen of Narnia and having Peter be the one who turns his back on Aslan, if they want. But they won’t be free to publish new Narnia novels because “Narnia” and its appurtenances are trademarked by C S Lewis PTE, and that won’t change in 2034.

Come to think of it, it’s possible that C S Lewis PTE will try to use its trademark to prevent, or at least control, publication of public domain books; which might even work, in some court or other. What happens when copyright law points in one direction and trademark law in another? If Disney holds a trademark on Mickey Mouse but Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, what does that mean for some auteur who wants to incorporate the film into a new film, a new work of art, from which she hopes to make money? As restrictive as copyright can be, it expires; trademarks, if they are defended, do not.

These issues have yet to be sorted out in court. But If we want to make books like The Stone Table possible, we need to revise not copyright law but trademark law.

Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way 

— W. S. Merwin, “Words from a Totem Animal” 

(I had the privilege of reading Francis Spufford’s The Stone Table in draft, with what I believe the enthusiasts call “dawning wonder,” and also with increasing frustration at a copyright regime that made it unlikely to be published. So a few months ago I wrote the essay you see below. After some reflection I decided not to publish it; but now that the word is out about The Stone Table, I’m posting it here.) 

One of the best works of fiction I have read in the past several years was written by the acclaimed English writer Francis Spufford — and no, I do not refer to his award-winning novel Golden Hill, though indeed I loved that book too. The story I’m referring to is called The Stone Table, and before you Google it or look for it on Amazon, please understand that you will not find it. And that’s because of intellectual property law.

For Spufford’s book is set in Narnia, the fictional world created by C. S. Lewis. The Stone Table features characters who appear in other Narnia books: most notably, two children named Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke and the great lion Aslan. The seven Narnia books that Lewis wrote have already come into the public domain in some countries, and may even do so in the United States — though those of us who have seen the law extend copyright again and again may be pardoned for doubting that it will ever happen. But Spufford has written a new Narnia story, so copyright law doesn’t affect his: what matters is that the world of Narnia is a registered trademark of C. S. Lewis (PTE.) Ltd. — and trademarks, if they are consistently used and defended against infringement, last forever. (This is why so many companies will sue for trademark infringement even in apparently trivial cases: they’re afraid that if they don’t they’ll be accused of having abandoned their copyright.) Moreover, trademarks are often international in their scope.

So as long as there is money to be made from Narnia™, then books like The Stone Table cannot be published and sold without the express consent of C. S. Lewis (PTE.) Ltd.

Now, in many cases trademark holders are more than happy to give — or rather, sell — such consent. Certainly Middle-Earth Enterprises, the company that now holds the rights to Hobbit- and Lord of the Rings-related material, rights that Tolkien himself sold to United Artists in 1969, was pleased to make it possible for us to recreate Helm’s Deep in Lego. For instance. But the remainder of Tolkien’s writings are copyrighted, and several trademarks held, by Tolkien’s estate, which has sometimes led to confusing legal struggles: Wait, Tolkien is suing Middle-Earth? And Middle-Earth is suing him back?

And these different parties have not always had the same interests. Tolkien’s son Christopher, who directed the estate before his resignation in 2017 at the age of 93, did not like Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, would certainly have prevented the filming of The Hobbit if he could have, and would have been unlikely ever to approve a film or television version of his father’s vast legendarium, The Silmarillion — even though such a project could greatly enrich the Tolkien Estate’s coffers. Who knows what will happen now that the Estate is in other hands? But Christopher always had a strong sense of the character and purpose of his father’s work, and did not want that character and purpose to be violated. Money is not everything.

A very similar attitude seems to drive the C. S. Lewis estate, and especially Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham. When I was working on my biography of Lewis — in the year or so preceding the release of the film version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with which it was meant to coincide — a shadow of anxiety always hovered over the project, because no one knew exactly what Gresham would think of it. He couldn’t have stopped it from being published, but he certainly could have withheld the estate’s cooperation from my publisher, HarperOne, and made life more difficult and considerably less lucrative for them. That would have (de facto if not de jure) meant the quashing of my biography. I am certain that my editor, the shrewd and resourceful Mickey Maudlin, had to do some delicate negotiating both with Gresham, who wanted his stepfather’s memory properly honored, and with me, who wanted to be left alone to write the book I wanted to write. But Mickey played his cards very close to his vest, so I am not sure to this day how awkward those negotiations got.

Last year Mickey and I had a conversation about a new book, a collection of Lewis’s writings about reading. Lewis wrote very eloquently about the theory and practice of reading, and as his biographer and the author of a book about reading I might seem to be a good candidate to select and annotate his thoughts on the subject. But again approval of the estate was required; and approval, for reasons not wholly clear to me, was not granted.

It’s enough to make me long for estates driven by a list for filthy lucre. For, though I admire the determination of Christopher Tolkien and Douglas Gresham, and other directors of those estates, to be faithful custodians of rich and wonderful imaginative worlds, I am not convinced that they can legitimately offer the final, unquestionable verdict about what does in fact honor Lewis’s and Tolkien’s writings. Great writers — and I believe both Lewis and Tolkien to have been great writers — tend to have more comprehensive minds than those charged with their estates’ care. This is why I have for so long admired Edward Mendelson, W. H. Auden’s literary executor, who has for decades now offered unfailing support to scholars working on Auden, even when those scholars have views about Auden radically different than his own. Mendelson grasps what many literary executors and estates do not: that, just because Auden is a writer whose greatness is not reducible to a single point of view, it is better to be overly generous than overly restrictive.

The world will not much miss the book on Lewis and reading that I would have made. But The Stone Table deserves a very wide readership indeed. Spufford has suppressed his own distinctive and eloquent style and made himself a ventriloquist of Lewis: to read the story is really and truly to return to the Narnia millions of readers love. And this is not merely a matter of style: Spufford’s story is thematically and even theologically Lewisian. It is a marvelous and utterly delightful tale, as wise as it is thrilling. I so wish you could read it.

Over the past year I’ve been making some significant changes to certain elements of my technological life — significant, but incremental and slow. I have tried not to change too many things at once, because when I’ve tried that in the past it has never worked out for me. Here’s a summary of my progress:

• I deleted my Instagram account. (I have not had a Facebook account since 2007.)
• I deactivated my Twitter account. I haven’t yet deleted it — I still wonder whether I might find a use for it some day. But I am not on Twitter and do not miss it, so deletion remains a possibility.
• I have been using a Micro.blog account for short posts. The community there is almost wholly pleasant, but I have had just enough tense exchanges to make me wary. I feel that all of us have learned our social-media habits from Twitter and Facebook and it may take us a little time to become fully decent again.
• I started a newsletter. 
• I have almost completely eliminated reading daily news, which, for me, has primarily meant deleting news sites from my RSS reader.
• I have shifted instead to reading more weekly and monthly magazines, especially in print, but sometimes on the Kindle. My new favorite magazine is The Economist — at which I looked askance for many years because I thought it a key mouthpiece of the neoliberal order, which it kinda is, but overall it’s a great magazine. I begin by reading the summary of the week’s news, and then turn with particular interest to reports from parts of the world that I wouldn't ordinarily think about. It does a lot to put American kerfuffles into meaningful context.
• I am moving more and more of my data out of the cloud, and am moving back towards regular backups to hard drives, supplemented by key files stored in Apple’s iCloud. I have pared back my use of Google Docs and Dropbox to the bare nub, and may well delete my Dropbox account altogether in the coming months.
• I have moved all my online calendars from Google to iCloud, have moved my personal email from Gmail back to Fastmail — despite some problems I had with Fastmail last year, I am giving them another chance — and have deleted Google Maps from all my devices. (That last one is tough, because in my experience Apple Maps continues to be significantly inferior.) I have also moved to DuckDuckGo as my default, and since the move only, search engine. You can see where this is headed. Within a year I would like to have my Google account deleted.

Other than the Great De-Googling, a consummation devoutly to be wished, what do I hope to accomplish in the next year?

I want to go back to the analog system of task management that I had been using for a couple of years previous to this one. I am happiest and most focused when I track my responsibilities in a notebook, but last year I found myself, during a period of particular stress, nearly dropping a few balls, and that led me back to my favorite digital task manager, Things. Things is a beautiful and exceptionally well-designed app — those are two different things, by the way: some apps are beautiful without being well-designed, and vice versa — but I don’t want to get too dependent on it, because….

Mainly I want to eliminate day-to-day use of a smartphone. I don’t imagine that I can do without one altogether — they’re too valuable when traveling and in other special circumstances. But for my everyday life I want to get back to a dumbphone like the one I was using three years ago — before it stopped working with my network and the iPhone dragged me back in. (There’s a new and updated version of the Punkt.) I want a life in which I have only one internet-connected device, and that device is my laptop, and my laptop spends a lot of time in a bag.

I go to schools a lot, have taught at uni­ver­si­ties and seen a ton of great kids and pro­fes­sors who’ve re­ally sacrificed them­selves to teach. A few years ago I worked for a few months at an Ivy League school. I ex­pected a lot of ques­tions about pol­i­tics, his­tory and lit­er­ature. But that is not what the stu­dents were re­ally in­ter­ested in. What they were in­ter­ested in — it was al­most my first ques­tion, and it never abated — was net­work­ing. They wanted to know how you net­work. At first I was sur­prised: “I don’t know, that wasn’t on my mind, I think it all comes down to the work.” Then I’d ask: “Why don’t you just make friends in­stead?” By the end I was saying, “It’s a mis­take to see peo­ple as com­modi­ties, as things you can use! Con­cen­trate on the work!” They’d get im­pa­tient. They knew there was a se­cret to get­ting ahead, that it was net­working, and that I was cru­elly with­holding success­ful strate­gies.

— Peggy Noonan

I subscribed to the digital edition of the late, lamented Weekly Standard before its owner killed it and decided to throw his resources into a replacement, the Washington Examiner. Today I got an email thanking me for subscribing to the digital edition of the Examiner, which I did not do. 

Now that’s chutzpah: kill a magazine someone subscribes to and then, without even asking, take their money to support a wholly different magazine. It’s also fraud and theft. I have of course demanded that they cancel the subscription I never signed up for and delete my information. I wonder whether they will. 

I hope the Examiner gets its pants sued off for this. 

For decades, late February and early March were for me a season of preparation: preparation for baseball. I watched my favorite baseball websites come to life in my RSS reader, I bought some books that analyzed last year’s performances and predicted this year’s, I got excited about new signings and promising rookies.

But not this year.

John Thorn, the great historian of baseball, wrote in November,

The stolen base and the bunt are on the way out. The reasons for the decline in both have to do with analysts revealing that run expectations are radically lessened not only by the unsuccessful attempt but also, in the a case of the sacrifice bunt, by the successful execution. One may blame analysis, knowledge, and science for these outcomes, but it is hard to give three cheers for ignorance.

The dilemma for owners and players and fans may be understood as The Paradox of Progress: we know the game is better, so why, for so many, does it feel worse? I submit that while Science may win on the field, as clubs employ strategies that give them a better chance of victory, Aesthetics wins hearts and minds.

This is more or less precisely what I wrote last summer, when I described the complete victory of the Earl Weaver model of baseball strategy that I cheered on when I was a kid: “As boxing fans have always known, styles make fights. What made Earl’s Way so fascinating all those years ago was its distinctiveness; and that’s what made the arguments among fans fun too…. Strangely enough, baseball was better when we knew less about the most effective way to play it.”

Thorn is exactly right that “it’s hard to give three cheers for ignorance.” Me again:

It’s important to be clear about this: Coaches and players understand the percentages better than they ever have in the history of the game, and are acting accordingly. All of these changes I have traced are eminently rational. Players are giving themselves the best possible chance of success, in hopes of more money for them and more wins for their team. Even when they don’t try to bunt or slap a single into the vast open space on one side of a shifted infield, they’re being rational, because, as noted earlier, Earl was right: those base-at-a-time one-run strategies are highly inefficient.

So you can’t blame anyone for the way the game has developed. It has become more rational, with a better command of the laws of probability, and stricter, more rigorous canons of efficiency. But for those very reasons it’s not as fun to watch.

So it’s hard to see what the solution to this might be. What are the moguls of MLB supposed to do, mandate less rational tactics? In a way that’s precisely what they do plan to do, for instance by requiring pitchers to face at least three batters, even when bringing in, say, a lefty to face only the one left-handed hitter in the other team’s lineup might make more sense. But that kind of thing is just nibbling around the edges. It’s not going to do anything to change the overall strategies that are common today, as when batters are so committed to the long ball that they are content to have created a game in which there are more strikeouts than base hits.

In this context, I keep thinking about a passage from Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a passage that’s relevant to so much in our modern order:

In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the whole of the sugar production, I was faced by a display of white enamel tanks and chromium piping. Yet the various kinds of Martinique rum, as I tasted them in front of ancient wooden vats thickly encrusted with waste matter, were mellow and scented, whereas those of Puerto Rico are coarse and harsh. We may suppose, then, that the subtlety of the Martinique rums is dependent on impurities the continuance of which is encouraged by the archaic method of production. To me, this contrast illustrates the paradox of civilization: its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. By being doubly in the right, we are admitting our mistake. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.

Note that Levi-Strauss speaks of “the paradox of civilization,” John Thorn about “the Paradox of Progress.” It’s the same point. I was right to be rational in cheering on the sabermetric revolution; and these days I cherish the very imperfections I once wanted to see eliminated. But the savor is now gone, and I don’t know how it can be restored.