"Squck his thrug," squawked the parrot

[dubdobdee]

"Spoken words became a hissing and a mumble, or a murmur and a hum. A man named Otto Ott, when asked his name, could only stutter. Ophelia Oliver repeated hers, and vanished from the haunts of men."

It was given to my mother's mother by my dad, Christmas 1958, the year it was published. It predates La Disparition by 11 years: of course it's not a rigorous lipogram, more a brilliant sketch. The original illustrator, Marc Simont, is apparently still alive, in his mid-90s: hunting for him on the net, I found this.

The panic is about imitation and artistic ownership, as we've come to expect. But possession surely runs the other way. I use ghosts of Thurber's sentences and rhythms all the time, occasionally even buried half-quotes -- I doubt I could always spot when I'm doing it. Because as a child I read and reread and read again. I do not at all trust the citational structure we have established, in motivation or in effect: even as it acknowledges provenance, it reverses the poles. "Property" seems absolutely the worst possible metaphor.

If the pirates die, the cat will die. Trufax.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Sure but there is a distinction between using 'borrowed rhythms' within or say, borrowing an idea (always fluid and hard to grasp) that x writer used to think about something y, and then using (as seems to be in this case, correct me if I'm wrong) a very concrete image for something else and not even TELLING the illustrator and author. It seems that an abuse -- its not even about profit here -- has taken place.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

an idea isn't something you can "borrow" -- this already cedes ownership; and the hierarchy you're outlining ("very concrete" versus what?), about what constitutes acceptable practice and what's fine, is just a restatement of the property laws as they're more or less publicly outlined already

a better metaphor is that an idea is a connection between two minds, that it isn't an idea till it's shared -- what's ugly here is i think the emily-man's blocking of any possibility of those connecting with stuff via the ideas in his project also to connect to marc simont's project; the emily-man walls off the wider exchange; puts dulling limits on the sharing (emily is more interesting, in fact, if you know her provenance)... but respecting the "property" metaphor won't bring the wider exchange back into play; it just locks down the sharing in other directions -- turns it into a professional salary-generator available to those who can afford it