This has got to mean at least a few hundred K for me, yes? Party time!
More seriously, I don’t know what it means. $3000 per book or work — does that suggest that an essay or article or blog post, each of which is a “work,” is worth as much as a book? Searching here suggests that (with repetitions removed) I might have 20 items to be compensated for the use of. But I could have 200. Who knows? And who knows when matters will be decided?
On the larger and long-term issues surrounding this settlement, Dan Cohen is predictably terrific.
Two new arrivals I’m eager to read. That cover on Tim’s book!
Not all great guitarists have big hands — think of Prince, for instance — but most of them do. Yet the big-handers always insist that the rest of us can play what they play. This is an exceptionally annoying thing to hear. So I appreciate that Paul Davids, in this video on a beautiful John Mayer song, acknowledges (as does Mayer himself) that some people simply will not be able to play the song the way Mayer plays it.
Just look at that hipster. (Charlie Chaplin, 1916)
TLS: “Walt Disney’s background artist, Eyvind Earle, drew on Les Très Riches Heures for the colour palette of Sleeping Beauty.” Very obvious once it’s pointed out!
When Penguin paperbacks were a new innovation, you could buy them from a vending machine called the Penguincubator.
Foggy-headed from Covid I posted this one several days too early, but I’m just leaving it up because it matters to me. I’ll probably be quiet for a few days now.
I volunteered at the time in a second-hand bookshop, and often idly rifled through the surplus stock in the back. One day I found a copy of something called The Book of Common Prayer, which I had barely heard of at all. Out of sheer bemused curiosity, I flicked through it.
It was quite different to anything I had ever experienced before when I had had glancing contact with Christianity. I found myself recognising, perhaps through familiarity with an English literary canon profoundly influenced by it or the mysterious transmission of some cross-generational English collective unconscious, some of its phrases and rhythms. I was particularly struck by the general confession said at something called “morning” and “evening prayer”, with its talk of how we had “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” and “left undone those things which we ought to have done” and “done those things which ought not to have done”. I suppose I had become unsatisfied with the emptiness of many aspects of my life and unable to account for or give voice to a deep, visceral sorrow at my own unworthiness and the sinful actions that I was acutely conscious of having committed. It moved me: I was embarrassed at how much, but felt obscurely that it was important. I started carrying around a copy of this curious little book — the bookshop didn’t want it and would have chucked it out otherwise. I did it furtively.
Keep reading to find out where the story goes.
Ten years ago John Siracusa announced that he would no longer write his massive reviews of the new versions of macOS — the last one, on Yosemite, was typical: over 25,000 words. Ars is still running big reviews of macOS, but they’re not as long or as good as Siracusa’s were. With the enormous changes coming in Tahoe, I need a Siracusa review to be fully informed about whether to update or not.
‘Wystan Auden’ by James Schuyler | Poem of the Week | The TLS: Paywalled, alas. My favorite bit of the poem: When Schuyler was having an operation, Auden “sent quite a large / check” to cover his expenses, but Schuyler returned it and asked for cash instead. He seems to think it a perfectly normal thing to do.