Aptly named

Learned Hand (who was not just aptly but awesomely named) wrote:

Borrowed the work must indeed not be, for a plagiarist is not himself pro tanto an 'author'; but if by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose anew Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', he would be an 'author', and, if he copyrighted it, others may not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats's.  (Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 81 F.2d 49 (2nd Cir. 1936), aff'd 309 US 390 (1940), quoted in Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights, p 7).

This would be before "Pierre Menard" was published even in Argentina, though of course there is this salient difference, that Pierre Menard was acquainted with the Cervantes while Hand's hypothetical poet is ignorant of the Keats.  Nevertheless, to think to put in that last clause, one cannot but applaud him.

One of the same sets of circumstances in which the above was relevant also saw me making mention of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room, with which I am more impressed each time it comes up.  It turns out that the familiar 45-minute rendition available on Lovely Music isn't the original recording; there's a shorter, much more whistly 15-minute version, which the kind folks at Ubuweb have made available for free; this has the advantage over the longer one, of course, that you can see how the whole thing works in a third of the time, though the decay (naturally) is unable to advance as far in it as in the longer.  What called it lately to mind was a discussion of the theories of Schopenhauer and Gumbrecht (as a representative of Heidegger-flavored view which one can nevertheless get something of a handle on), for both of which—at least for the latter of which as one of the professors developed it and for the former of which as one might think it—it seems relevant.  With regard to the latter one of the ideas put forward was that the oscillation between presence and meaning effects Gumbrecht talks about is (though he tries to portray himself really as neutral actually) to lead to the gradual dominance of the presence effects; given the way I Am Sitting In A Room works, it should be fairly obvious how one might be led to make that connection.  With regard to the former, if one ignores Schopenhauer's actual comments about music and looks at his comments about art in general, such pieces as Sitting, and even more others of Lucier's such as Music On A Long Thin Wire, seem custom-made to show, not the will, but facets of its objectification.  What Schopenhauer says about the arts even in that regard always seems more far-fetched to me the more, say, representative the art under discussion is (and this goes for Gumbrecht as well), to the point where his comments about literature seem strained indeed; architecture, contrarily, seems fairly plausible:

…we can assign it no purpose other than that of bringing to clearer perceptiveness some of those Ideas that are the lowest grades of the will's objectivity.  Such Ideas are gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, those universal qualities of stone, those first, simplest, and dullest visibilities of the will, the fundamental bass-notes of nature; and along with these, light, which is in many respects their opposite.  (§43)

This seems more or less plausible, at least for a certain sort of architecture. Despite Lucier's claim in the text of the piece itself, Sitting does seem to illustrate some fact regarding the world's structure, or at least that of a little bit of it, beyond what is immediately available to the ordinary perciever.  It has to be brought out by art.  One could even claim that the will's discordant nature is brought out by the piece: after all, doesn't it proceed by tearing down the initial highly articulated sounds of Lucier's speech and wearing them into a uniform nothingness, just as the will's objectification in humans is to lead to its eventual quieting and self-nullification?  And with Music On A Long Thin Wire, how much more are basic physical relations being brought out!  In an extremely brief interview about the piece Lucier says It's one of the major pieces that I think I made.  It's an essential piece, describing most of the work that I've done.; I'm not that familiar with his work (the only other thing of his I have is Bird and Person Dyning), but one can see what he means, I think.

I also like both pieces because, like this shirt, of an instantiation of which I am now the delighted possessor, they are exactly what they claim to be.  He really was sitting in a room.  That music was made precisely by vibrating a long thin wire.  There's a green square, and there's a swan.  Beautiful. It's like the gang in Japan whose name is "Street Gang".  I feel like important work is being done here.  I was also a big fan of the orange juice stands in Berlin shaped like gigantic oranges.  At last, clarity!

Comments

[ogged]

Learned Hand singing.

[ben wolfson]

Nice that it's part of a field recordings series.