The Expensive Business of Quoting Poetry

Sam Leith ruminates on the unsettled "rules" and sometimes ridiculous costs to quoting poetry in a work of nonfiction. The article is here at The Spectator.  Below are a few snippets. 

It was both a courtesy and the right thing to do to seek permission to quote their work. . . . But the A.A. Milne estate was asking what seemed to me a crazy amount of money to quote a single couplet from that poem about Christopher Robin saying his prayers – and my publishers advised me, if I didn’t want to pay, to snip it out. Which I did. The rights holders for another author of verse, who shall remain nameless here, not only asserted that ‘fair dealing’ legislation – the provision that allows you to quote without permission – didn’t apply to their author but claimed an absolute right of veto on any quotation for ebooks or audio.

Poetry, I was told, is very dangerous. Not as dangerous as pop lyrics (everyone agrees that they are ‘a nightmare’. . .) – but much riskier than prose.

The problem here is not exactly the law. The problem is that nobody wants to test the law. As media lawyer David Hooper put it when I asked him: ‘Copyright law is distinctly unpredictable and expensive to litigate, which puts the copyright holders in quite a strong position.’

Centenary Folio Society Edition of Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter

I recently learned that the Folio Society has published an illustrated centenary edition of The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. Illustrated by Julie Dillon, and with an Introduction by Erin Morgenstern, and a reprinted introduction (from the 1999 Ballantine trade paperback edition) by Neil Gaiman. 

The Folio Society webpage for the book includes a 50 second video highlighting the production. It can be seen here. 

While the artist is clearly very talented, I confess her visions for the novel do not particularly appeal to me. 

A Reviewer's Life

A few extracts from an interesting article by Christine Smallwood, on "A Reviewer's Life: The Material Constraints of Writing Criticism Today":

Newspaper book reviews have been contracting for decades, and while magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic cover books, the hourly rate on a piece, once you do the calculation, is dismal. “Little” magazines and online reviews are wonderful for the culture, but no one could pay the rent writ­ing for those outlets alone. If you have a secure academic job and write reviews on the side, it’s nice work. For the freelancer—I am one—it’s a foolish undertaking. As Russell Jacoby noted nearly forty years ago, one reason there are not more full-time freelance writers is that most take staff writer positions or university jobs or quit writing altogether.

Writing a review is the best, maybe the only, way I can discover what I think. I don’t come to reviewing with my ideas already formed; I have to build them, sentence by sentence. For me, writing a review is a way of getting closer to an object, taking it apart to understand how it works.

Criticism is a conversation—with oneself but also with one’s editors, with readers, and with other reviewers. There is something hopeful about writing a review. It’s like putting a message in a bottle or sending up a flare. . . . Who knows where the person who will read the piece is sitting?

Read the full article in the Summer 2024 issue of The Yale Review, accessible here.

The Adaptation Tango

 George R.R. Martin has written:

Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.”   It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone.   No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it.   “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound.   Then they make the story their own.

They never make it better, though.   Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.

Amen to that.  The full blog post is here.

Literary Blogs from the Golden Age to the (Diminished) Present

"If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting), I do not expect that litblogging as we knew it at the beginning will make any kind of significant comeback. Which is not to say that blogging will not survive, just that it won't again have the same king of salience to the direction literary culture takes as it briefly did in the nascent days of the blogosphere. Bloggers will have to be satisfied with a medium that offers limited reach but allows them maximum freedom and infinite space to say what they have to say at whatever length, and perhaps find an audience who wants to hear it. This may be the most invaluable promise the blog made to writers in the first place."

 Read the full essay "What Hath the Blog Wrought?" by Daniel Green here. 

Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature

Jonah Winter's article, "Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature," published on 5 February 2024 in The Wall Street Journal, is a sad story of the state of publishing today.

"Children's publishers now live in fear of these activists, terrified of showing up on their radar with a book or author that could be deemed “problematic”—meaning out of alignment with the activists' puritanical code. According to that code, an author's identity must match a book's subject matter. Further, certain books can harm children, the activists believe, and books they deem harmful must be removed. If that sounds similar to the right-wing activists' mission, it's because it is. The only difference is that while right-wing activists merely want certain books removed from particular schools, left-wing activists want the books they target annihilated."

The full article is here, but probably behind a paywall. Jonah Winter has also done a picture book for children (with artist Gary Kelley) on a related topic. It's called Banned Book. Worth a look, and worth supporting.

Lord Dunsany's The Curse of the Wise Woman

The Dublin Review of Books has an interesting article by Robin Wilkinson on Lord Dunsany, particularly covering The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). It is titled "Dunsany's Careless Abundance" and is available here. 

A snippet:

In his autobiographical Patches of Sunlight (1938), Dunsany recalls the day he discovered the tales of Edgar Allan Poe in the school library, and straightway read them all, enthralled by ‘the haunted desolation and weird gloom of the misty mid-region of Weir’. He salutes his American cousin once again in The Curse of the Wise Woman, which includes Poe’s description of ‘soulless dissipation’ at Eton, the English boarding school that Poe himself did not attend, although as it happens both Charles [a character in The Curse of the Wise Woman] and Dunsany did. The passage he quotes is taken from William Wilson, Poe’s doppelgänger tale of a young man of noble ancestry haunted by his unrelated twin, a second self who follows him everywhere, much as Charles follows in the footsteps of his creator.