Peiratikos

Eve Tushnet has written a good essay on Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Now I’m almost tempted to reread Watchmen… Her stuff on symmetrical patterns in the text is making me think of Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinths—symmetrical patterns and labyrinths as metaphors for reality, reality as an unsolvable puzzle we are driven to solve.

I’d make the “two unsuccessful replacement gods” Eve mentioned a trio, adding Nixon, responsible for outlawing masked vigilantes (along with Keene of Keene Act fame, I suppose) and for coming dangerously close to starting a nuclear war with the Soviet Union for the sake of whatever American ideals still exist in the world of Watchmen. Not only masked vigilantes and big blue superguys threaten the world with their attempts to impose a moral meaning or pattern. Adrian Veidt, Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach, Dan and Laurie, Nixon, all have an asymmetrical power relationship with the rest of the people in the world—I mean, they’re potentially better equipped than others to create and manipulate patterns of meaning in the world. Veidt and Nixon are especially similar, in that they both choose methods of acheiving their goals which kill millions of people.

I’d meant to talk about this in the last post… We have a Creative Commons license, as I mentioned a couple days ago. This means that you are free to:

• copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and
• make derivative works

as long as you:

• give the original author(s) credit and
• don’t use this work for commercial purposes and
• release any alterations, transformations, derivations, etc. of our texts under the same Creative Commons license that we use.

Our CC license is a poltical statement, our own small voices against the sort of copyright fuckery which allows Disney to sue schoolteachers who put pictures of Winnie the Pooh in their classrooms.

If you don’t want to waive any of your copyright but want to free your work from being tied up in copyright until decades after you’re dead, Creative Commons offers legal assistance for other alternatives to standard copyright, including a Founders’ Copyright that grants you copyright as described in the United States’ 1790 copyright law. For the DJs in the audience, there’s a Sampling License (useful not only for DJs, but for any artist who wants to incorporate and play with bits of others’ works).

Crushies for Dean wins!

Our group is open to anyone who wants to join us in swooning over Howard Dean and discussing why (as one of our founding crushies wrote: “is it his confidence? his compassion? his sincerity? his intelligence? his…well, this could go on and on! Let’s just say it’s all of those amazing character traits and…that look in his eyes…”).

Howard Dean